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ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE. 
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trated. Large crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50, net. 
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Boston and New York. 



ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE 
AND LIFE 



ATONEMENT IN 
LITERATURE AND LIFE 

BY 

CHAELES ALLEN DINSMORE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
<£&e fitoer?i&e $re&, Cambri&ge 

1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 80 1906 

\i Copyright Entry 

CLASS A XM„ NO, 
' COPY B/ ' 



3? 



COPYRIGHT I906 BY CHARLES A. DINSMORE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published December jqob 



To 

MY FATHER 

WHO THROUGH PAIN ENTERED INTO THE 

GREAT RECONCILIATION 

ft 



PREFACE 

In adding a volume to the ever increasing flood 
of books issued from the press of to-day, it be- 
comes a writer to state his reasons for challenging 
the attention of a surfeited and much-enduring 
public. Especially is this true when the subject 
is so apparently outworn and rejected as the 
atonement. For this theme, once so command- 
ing and of conceded importance, has been quite 
generally neglected, even by religious people, 
and fails to arouse more than a languid interest. 
The venerated interpretations now seem anti- 
quated, and the dogma itself is in many pulpits 
discredited. But a doctrine which has entered so 
vitally into spiritual thought and experience, and 
which every age has explained in its own language 
and according to its prevailing philosophy, must 
contain a residuum of truth which will ever abide 
and reclothe itself in a fashion suited to each 
generation. 

The word " atonement," as I shall use it, is em- 
ployed to explain the method by which reconcili- 



viii PREFACE 

ation with God, with life, and with one's past 
is achieved. My purpose is not to elaborate a 
dogma. This would be a thankless task. " It is 
not summation of doctrine that we want," says 
Bushnell, " we have enough of that. What we 
want a great deal more is something to give us 
greater breadth of standing and greater vitality 
of idea." In attempting to satisfy this need I 
have sought to take the gospel of reconciliation 
out of the stiff forms of theology and to find its 
essential truths as they appear in life, and life as 
the best minds have seen it. As this theme holds 
as prominent a place in literature as in religion, 
it has seemed to me that atonement might pro- 
fitably be studied in the pages of the great seers 
who have been recognized by the generations as 
portraying most truthfully the guilt, the woe, the 
peace of the heart. I have no knowledge that 
any one has preceded me in thus approaching 
one of Christianity's supreme verities. This jour- 
ney over an untried way has brought to view two 
aspects of reconciliation which are clearly revealed 
in literature, but which have been either sadly 
neglected by theology, or not given their proper 
place in our systems of religious thought. One 
becomes convinced, as he walks with those master 
minds who " saw life steadily and saw it whole," 



PREFACE ix 

that the legend of Lethe with its magical waters 
has a deep spiritual value ; and that a trust in 
" some soul of goodness in things evil " exercises 
a most important part in reconciliation. In the 
second section of this volume these two truths 
have been interpreted in their religious signifi- 
cance, and have been given the prominent posi- 
tion which belongs to them in a doctrine of re- 
conciliation. Whatever worth there may be in 
these truth s, and the intrinsic interest of the 
method pursued, constitute the writer's claim to 
a patient reading. I have also endeavored to in- 
dicate the distinction between the work of the 
historical Jesus and the Eternal Christ, although 
the difficulties of drawing the line of demarcation 
are obvious. Some confusion would have been 
avoided by using the phrase " indwelling God " 
rather than the designation "Eternal Christ." 
But both the Scriptures and Christian experience 
apply the name " Christ " to the immanent Spirit, 
and I have felt at liberty to follow their exam- 
ple in order to enforce the truth of the eternal 
atonement wrought by the Son of God. 

To have developed the thoughts contained in 
this volume into a treatise, by refining definitions, 
by refuting critics, and by formulating a closely 
articulated dogma, would have been contrary to 



x PREFACE 

my inclinations and beyond my ability. It 
would also have narrowed the circle of readers 
to a select company of theological experts, and 
have made the book unattractive to that ever 
increasing number of readers who are interested 
in the deep things of the spirit, but care little 
for the technical language of religious science. 
I have therefore chosen the simpler method of 
sketching in broad outline truths which seem to 
me of superlative importance. 

The following pages may be criticised for be- 
ing too repetitious in statement. The fault, if it 
be such, arises partly from the large number of 
witnesses called, and partly from my desire to 
strongly emphasize one or two elemental truths. 
I have preferred to err on the side of repeated 
statement, rather than to fail of making the 
meaning perfectly clear. 

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to 
Professor Edward Y. Hincks, D. D., for pertinent 
criticisms which have led me to express with 
greater accuracy and fullness the subject matter 
under consideration, and to the Rev. Joseph An- 
derson, D. D., and the Rev. Charles H. Oliphant 
for giving me the benefit of their trained literary 
tastes and their fine sense of the fitness of words 
and phrases in the revision of the book. These 



PREFACE xi 

friends have put their disciplined judgments so 
freely at my disposal that I must take upon my- 
self the responsibility for what is unfinished in 
form or erroneous in doctrine. 

Charles Allen Dinsmore. 



CONTENTS 
PART I 

CHAPTER I 

Dominant Ideas in Literature and Religion 

Sin, retribution, and reconciliation are the controlling ideas of 
both religion and literature. No religion can permanently win 
the assent of men which does not have a clear and sane teaching 
regarding the reconciliation of God and man. This reconcilia- 
tion is to be studied through poets rather than through theolo- 
gians. Such a method offers a new point of view, and promotes 
clarity of thought. As reconciliation takes place between per- 
sons, it may well be studied from life. Dante chose poets for 
his guides. Literature is life at its best expression. An objec- 
tion answered and a limitation stated. Divine and human for- 
giveness analogous 3 

CHAPTER II 

Some Definitions and Assertions 

Inattention to definition causes confusion. Reconciliation and 
atonement defined. Relation of the incarnation to the atone- 
ment. Phillips Brooks quoted. A fact like the atonement 
inseparable from theory. A doctrine of the atonement neces- 
sary . 19 

CHAPTER HI 

Homer 

The theme of the Iliad is sin, retribution, reconciliation. 
Quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. Reconciled by a 






xiv CONTENTS 

realization of the consequences, by repentance, by public con- 
fession, and an endeavor to make amends. Reconciliation 
between deity and the offender. Sin not conceived in its Chris- 
tian meaning. Defilement of sin. Honor paid to the divine 
majesty 29 



CHAPTER IV 

iEsCHYLUS 

The Greek theatre at its best was the pulpit of the day. Plot 
of the " Oresteia." iEschylus' conception of God. The law of 
heredity. The retributive justice of God in history. Curse is 
stayed when it falls upon Orestes, a righteous man. The Furies 
honored. Hereditary evil checked by the moral will of a good 
man. The vicarious sufferer in " Prometheus Bound " . .39 



CHAPTER V 

Sophocles 

The Shakespeare of the ancient stage. Story of " CEdipus." 
The inexorable divine order. What will satisfy the divine jus- 
tice ? Suffering endured submissively until the heart is purified 
and the will subdued. (Edipus is partially reconciled because 
evil has worked good 59 



CHAPTER VI 

Dante 

Latin literature omitted because conspicuously lacking in 
ethical and spiritual originality. The "Divina Commedia " 
outlined. Sin personified in Lucifer. Dante centres his theo- 
logy in the love of God. Christ's death satisfies the divine 
justice, and remits the eternal penalties of sin for all who accept 
it by baptism. Man's part is performed by confession, contri- 
tion, and satisfactory deeds which expiate and purify. A Lethe 
for the memory. Dante is reconciled to life and its disciplines 
because he sees all things in God 69 



CONTENTS xv 

CHAPTER VII 

Shakespeare 

Compared with Dante and Sophocles. The moral framework 
of the world powerfully disclosed. Macbeth. Richard III. 
Place of death in tragedy. Shakespeare could not permanently 
be satisfied with the conception of life portrayed in the trage- 
dies. Reconciliation in " The Winter's Tale." " The Tempest " 
expresses Shakespeare's reconciliation with life. There is a 
Good Will working in all and over all. Goodness victorious 
over calamities. Queen Katharine. Cardinal Wolsey. Peace 
for the memory 89 

CHAPTER Yin 

Milton 

Differs from Dante and Shakespeare in his treatment of sin. 
Emphasizes its lawlessness. Gives prominence to a neglected 
truth. The mind is at peace only when the results of evil are 
intrusted to an all-sufficient grace. Adam's agony. Michael's 
revelation of Christ's victory. " Paradise Regained " is based 
on the victory of Christ, and not on his sufferings . . . 107 

CHAPTER IX 

George Eliot 

Only special phases of reconciliation hereafter to be consid- 
ered. Reconciliation in " Adam Bede." The story. An incom- 
plete and shadowed reconciliation. Contrition, confession, and 
partial satisfaction. Propitiation, but unalterable loss. Differs 
from Milton and Tennyson 119 

CHAPTER X 

Hawthorne 

"The Scarlet Letter." Resemblance to Dante's "Purgato- 
rio." Need of confession in reconciliation. Propitiation of just 
indignation. A greater measure of reconciliation in " The Scar- 
let Letter " than in " Adam Bede." 125 



xvi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XI 

Hosea and Tennyson 

Story of Gomer's desertion. Hosea's unfailing affection. 
Principles of reconciliation: suffering love, repentance in view 
of consequences, maintenance of moral distinctions by expiatory 
sufferings, propitiation of holy indignation. " Idylls of the King." 
Arthur's holy love is checked in its passion for reconciliation 
by an instinctive revulsion from evil, which cannot be ignored, 
but must be allayed 135 



CHAPTER XII 

Job, The Suffering Servant, Psalm xvh, 
Stmonds, Whitman, and Whittier 

Job's problem is to be reconciled to the providential ordering 
of his life. The plot of the story. The realization of God's 
presence and goodness is sufficient for reconciliation. An in- 
sight into results compensates the Servant for his sufferings. 
The beatific vision reconciles the Psalmist to life's losses. 
Symonds' spiritual doubts. Comte's advice. His religion of 
" cosmic enthusiasm." Whitman found his reconciliation with 
life in the faith "that a kelson of the creation is love." Whit- 
tiers' trust in an Eternal Goodness 143 



PART II 
CHAPTER I 

Deductions 

a. Sin, retribution, forgiveness. Different characterizations of 
sin : its defilement, devastation, moral blindness, lawlessness. 
Certainty of retribution. Conscience aroused by the knowledge 
of the results of sin, not by the revelation of love. Conditions 
to be met in reconciliation: repentance, confession, satisfaction. 
Sanctity of moral obligations must suffer no diminution in for- 
giveness 155 

b. Reconciliation — a larger question than forgiveness. Mem- 



CONTENTS xvii 

ory needs a Lethe. The triumph of goodness, either realized or 
believed in by faith, is the ground of reconciliation . . . 164 



CHAPTER II 

Poets and Theologians 

Over against every prominent expounder of the atonement is 
a poet or novelist who caught the same vision and proclaimed 
the same essential truth. iEschylus and Anselm. Aquinas and 
Dante. Duns Scotus and Sophocles. Grotius and the Greek 
dramatists. McLeod Campbell and Hawthorne. Bushnell, 
Hugo, Shakespeare. Propitiation emphasized by Hosea, George 
Eliot, Tennyson. The ever-recurring idea that forgiveness must 
be righteous. Reconciliation with life the aspect of the atone- 
ment most interesting to the modern mind. Attained through 
a belief in Goodness in all and over all 173 



CHAPTER III 

What did Jesus of Nazareth do for the Forgiveness 

of our Sins ? 

Recapitulation. A well-attested fact that Jesus does save men 
from their sins. He arouses and deepens men's consciousness of 
God's moral character. He quickens and intensifies men's sense 
of sin by his words, actions, and consciousness. By entering 
into the consciousness of Jesus man realizes both the nature of 
sin and the holiness and love of God. Coming into the circle of 
the influence of Jesus, man grows into oneness with God. The 
cross is the focus of all the truths and forces disclosed in the 
life of Jesus 191 



CHAPTER IV 

What does the Eternal Christ do for our 
Reconciliation ? 

What forgiveness cannot do. Omission of modern writers to 
study the atonement in the light of man's relationship to his 



xviii CONTENTS 

fellows. The brother of the prodigal son. Jacob and his sons. 
The horror of sin is its contagion. Atonement for the memory. 
There can be no reconciliation with one's past without either a 
knowledge of how the effects of sin subserve a good purpose, or 
a faith that God will make human wrath to praise him. Karma. 
There can be no reconciliation with life without the recognition of 
the presence of goodness overcoming evil. Dante, Job, Milton, 
Whittier, Brooks. There can be no reconciliation on the part of 
the offended unless evil works a compensating good. God's re- 
conciliation based on the accomplishment of his purpose. The 
Eternal Christ is Christianity's solution of cosmic evil. The 
early tendency to regard Jesus as incarnating the humanity of 
God. The Trinity. The perpetual sacrifice and suffering of 
Christ. It is a process toward victory. Promises of Christ's ulti- 
mate triumph. All things are to be put under his feet. Sin will 
be so dealt with that every living creature will be satisfied. This 
an essential part of the atonement. That God must be satisfied 
is the note of every great theory of the atonement. He is sat- 
isfied by the glorious accomplishment of his purposes in creation 
and redemption. Christ's victory is the Lethe for the memory. 
The indwelling Christ is literally taking our sins upon himself. 
His triumph is as essential a part of the atonement as his suffer- 
ings. That a Power not ourselves is working for righteousness 
is an observable fact. Gives a motive for action. Nature of 
evil. Summary 213 



PART I 



THE DOMINANT IDEAS IN LITERATURE AND 
RELIGION 



Poet and prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. 
In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous ; Votes means 
both prophet and poet : and indeed at all times, prophet and poet, well 
understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally they are 
the same ; in this most important respect especially, that they have 
penetrated, both of them, into the sacred mystery of the universe. . . . 
This divine mystery is in all times and in all places ; veritably is. In 
most times and places it is greatly overlooked ; . . . but now, I say, who- 
ever may forget this divine mystery, the Vates, whether prophet or 
poet, has penetrated into it ; is a man, sent hither to make it more im- 
pressively known to us. While others forget it, he knows it ; — I might 
say, he has been driven to know it ; without consent asked of hi?n, he 
finds himself living in it. Once more, here is no hearsay, but a direct 
insight and belief ; this man, too, could not help being a sincere man ! 
Whoever may live in the show of things, it is for him a necessity of 
nature to live in the fact of things. — Thomas Carlyle. 

If there were no witness in the world's deeper literature to the 
fact of an Atonement, the Atonement would be useless, since the for- 
mula expressing it would be unintelligible. — W. Robertson Nicoll. 



ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE 
AND LIFE 

CHAPTER I 

DOMINANT IDEAS IN LITERATURE AND RELIGION 

The central theme of the Bible is Sin, Retri- 
bution, and Reconciliation. It is stated imme- 
diately in the first chapters of Genesis, which 
describe the fall of man, announce the fearful 
consequences of his transgression, and promise 
that the seed of the woman shall bruise the ser- 
pent's head. Sin, Retribution, Reconciliation, — 
these three words give interest to every story in 
the Scriptures, interpret every psalm, form the 
burden of every prophecy, and explain the pro- 
gressive development of God's purpose in the 
history of Israel and in the person of Christ. 

But these great words are not the exclusive 
property of the Bible. They lie at the heart of 
all religions. Under all discrepancies of creed, 
every faith bears this testimony : that there is in 
man an uneasiness growing out of the sense of 
something wrong within him, and that he is to 
be saved from this wrongness by making proper 
connections with the higher powers. Along with 



4 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the wrong part, man is aware of a better part 
within him, even though this be but a helpless 
germ. In seeking deliverance from the wrong 
" he becomes conscious that this higher part is 
conterminous and continuous with a More of the 
same quality, which is operative in the universe 
outside of him, and which he can keep in work- 
ing touch with, and in a fashion get on board of 
and save himself when all his lower being has 
gone to pieces in the wreck." * 

All religions agree that the " More " exists 
and acts. They differ chiefly in their interpreta- 
tion of what this " More" is and how it operates. 
But Sin, Retribution, Reconciliation are the 
foundation stones upon which every faith builds 
its worship and its creed. 

These three words are also the strands of the 
crimson thread running through all the world's 
great literature. They constitute the plot of the 
human drama as it has unfolded itself before the 
eyes of the supreme poets and novelists. They 
form the theme which has engrossed the thoughts 
of the immortals in the world of letters, from 
Homer to George Eliot. No other subjects are 
broad enough to embrace all humanity, or deep 
enough to defy exhaustion, or commanding 
enough to absorb the attention of the incompar- 
able minds of the race. 

1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 
508. 



DOMINANT IDEAS 5 

Assuming the awful fact of sin, laying tre- 
mendous emphasis on the certainty of retribution, 
the ever-recurrent and developing thought of the 
Bible is reconciliation. It is promised in the Gar- 
den of Eden ; it explains the election of a unique 
people, its achievement is the glory of Christ, 
and the power of the New Testament message. 
The gospel is "that God was in Christ recon- 
ciling the world unto himself." Christianity does 
not differ from other religions in its fundamental 
problems, but in its more consistent and satisfy- 
ing method of bringing men into harmony with 
God. No religion can permanently win the assent 
of the reason and captivate the hearts of men 
without having a clear, well-digested, and sane 
teaching of the method by which God and man 
are reconciled. 

Theology's usual and appropriate approach to 
this great doctrine of the at-one-ment of human- 
ity with Deity has been along the lines of Scrip- 
ture. All the rites and ceremonies of the Hebrew 
faith have been searched diligently to find adum- 
brations of the meaning of the cross. Every text 
has been scanned for some hint to a solution of 
the great problem. Each word, sentence, meta- 
phor, sacrifice, and institution has been placed 
upon the rack and tortured again and again in 
the hope that it would give up some unuttered se- 
cret. But biblical texts have been made to teach 
so many divergent views that it is no easy task 



6 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

to study them without prepossessions. They have 
formed the ground of so many fierce theological 
battles that little wheat is left to be gleaned from 
the trampled soil. 

While disclaiming any thought of casting 
reproach upon the accepted method of studying 
our gospel of reconciliation, we shall approach 
Calvary by a new path. Poets, rather than theo- 
logians, will be our guides ; dramatists will take 
the place of schoolmen. Again we repeat that 
we do not forsake the ancient way to discredit it. 
We shall understand prophets, apostles, theolo- 
gians better when we comprehend how the deep- 
est problems of life have been interpreted by 
their spiritual kindred, — the supreme seers of 
literature. 

The advantages of this way of approach are 
obvious. It will offer a new point of view. Old 
truths become wondrously impressive when seen 
from an unwonted angle, fresh relationships are 
discerned, and unsuspected meanings are re- 
vealed. An unusual method promotes clearness 
of thought. Christianity cannot have escaped all 
distortion in its translation into the terms of 
Occidental speech. Metaphors which, to one bred 
in the temper of the East and accustomed to a 
rich coloring of thought, are replete with spir- 
itual significance, are, to the more prosaic West- 
erner, crass and misleading. Symbols which once 
fitted living truths with perfect adjustment are 



DOMINANT IDEAS 7 

to us but lifeless shells, archseological curiosi- 
ties, whose purpose we vainly try to comprehend. 
The approach to the cross through the Jewish 
sacrificial system, with its altar forms and the 
" faded metaphors " of theological thought, has 
grave disadvantages. While it is a true and 
indispensable way, yet it affords many oppor- 
tunities for a mind trained in other habits of 
thought to be led astray. Observations taken 
from a different point may serve to correct many 
errors in the ancient survey. Moreover, recon- 
ciliation takes place between persons, and may 
well be studied from life, — life in its richly varied 
aspects as seen by the most penetrating observers. 
We cannot understand anything when it is in 
isolation. Arms from a man, legs from a horse, 
lungs from a squirrel, skin from an elephant, a 
spinal column from a giraffe, made into a creature, 
would form an animal hideous beyond thought. 
Yet this has been the method of many theo- 
logians who have written upon the atonement. 
They have taken a verse of Oriental poetry, a 
metaphor from a prophetic writer, a link from 
one of Paul's arguments, a ceremonial from 
Hebrew ritual, and have attempted to fit them 
together into a living truth. The results have 
not always been edifying. Literature, on the 
other hand, is an interpreter of life. It is per- 
manent only as it is true to the basal facts and 
sentiments of humanity. A genuinely great writer 



8 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

does not even control his own characters after he 
has created them. Having once been born, they 
become living beings, acting according to the 
inner laws of their natures. "I had more fun 
with Sam Weller," Dickens once said to a friend, 
" than any of my readers ever had. I did not 
know what Sam was going to say, but he would 
talk and I would write, and he said and did so 
many funny things that I was in constant merri- 
ment." This is characteristic of men of genius. 
They are servants to the forces of nature which 
work through them. A " daimon " possesses 
them, a god speaks through them. The eviden- 
tial value of their teaching is very great, for 
they are sure witnesses of the elemental laws of 
life. 

The validity of this method of inquiry is appar- 
ent. Milton affirms that a good book is the "pre- 
cious life blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and 
treasured ; " but a great book is even more : it is the 
distillation of an epoch, the nectar of a civilization. 
Homer is the essential spirit of prehistoric Greece, 
Dante is the " voice of ten silent centuries," Ten- 
nyson the interpreter of the struggle of faith 
with science. When we study the problems of 
sin and reconciliation in their deathless pages we 
are getting the testimony of an era, we are learn- 
ing what has seemed true to many generations. 
Their affirmations therefore come clothed with 
august authority. They throw on old truths new 



DOMINANT IDEAS 9 

light which transfigures them with impressive 
and unfamiliar glory. 

Dante bears eloquent witness to the radiance 
which literature casts upon the path of life. 
When he would show the way by which God 
saves a soul lost in the dark wood of sin, he takes 
for his first guide Virgil, — symbol of the human 
reason at its best. One cannot help inquiring 
why he did not choose Aristotle, for whom he 
had an almost superstitious reverence, calling him 
" Master of those who know," and even declar- 
ing that " where the divine judgment of Aris- 
totle opens its mantle, it seems to me that we 
should pass by the judgment of all other men." 
In setting aside Aristotle and selecting Virgil, 
Dante undoubtedly recorded his deliberate judg- 
ment that the soul finds its safest guide in the 
poets rather than in the philosophers. It is in 
poetry that reason moves in its crystalline and 
loftiest sphere. There it gains the surest insights. 
More than all others the true poet sees the dread 
nature of sin and its fearful reprisals. In the 
" Purgatorio " Dante again shows his reverence 
for the poets. When he and Virgil, — Eeason, 
— baffled by the steep ascent of the Holy Moun- 
tain, needed some one to guide them, it was first 
the poet Sordello, and then Statius, who led the 
travelers' feet into right paths and their minds 
into hidden truth. To Dante's mind it was ap- 
parent that the supreme guides sent by Divine 



10 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Grace to reveal the fell results of sin and to 
show how God uses pain to purge the stains o£ 
evil, are the poets. In this his judgment accords 
with that of Aristophanes, who said : " Chil- 
dren have the schoolmasters to teach them, but 
when men are grown up the poets are their 
teachers." 

Poetry, and indeed all great literature, is an 
interpretation of life. The permanence and rank 
of any production is measured by the faithful- 
ness of its representation of life. Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare live because they caught the inner 
spirit of an epoch or a creed and gave it a form 
of beauty. They were more than artists : they 
saw life steadily and saw it whole. They were 
open-eyed, and beheld the essential beneath the 
superficial, rightly dividing the real from the pre- 
tentious. To see deeply, and to express clearly 
what one sees, is the secret of all literary art. 
Literature manifests the inner spirit of truth. It 
is imperishable in proportion as life is truly re- 
vealed in it. Whatever is exaggerated, meretri- 
cious, false, is a blemish. " When I write any- 
thing which I know or suspect to be morbid, I 
feel as though I had told a lie," records Haw- 
thorne in one of his note-books. The sure in- 
stincts of the race have selected here and there 
a poem, a drama, a story, and have lifted it out 
of the hurrying stream of oblivion and placed 
it on the serene heights among the world's trea- 



DOMINANT IDEAS 11 

sures because it truly embodies the aspirations, 
the woes, the joys of life. Literature not only 
deals with life, but with the same aspect of life 
that is reflected in the Scriptures. In both we 
find Sin, defeating humanity, breaking the moral 
framework of the world; Retribution, long de- 
layed, hidden often, yet sure as the movements 
of the stars; Reconciliation, obtained at great 
cost, but bringing peace with self, with the in- 
jured, and with God. Out of these three great 
realities grew what is noblest in art and pro- 
foundest in religion, and by studying them in 
the light of the world's ripest experiences we 
cannot fail of obtaining valuable spiritual in- 
sights. In looking through the eyes of the lofti- 
est seers of the Western world upon the funda- 
mental realities and the problems dealt with in 
the Scriptures, we shall see more clearly what is 
the distinctive contribution of Christianity to 
our knowledge and hope. 

One accustomed to an ancient phraseology 
may object that such an investigation as is here 
proposed does not sufficiently take into account 
the distinction between the gropings of human 
reason and the certainties of a divine revelation, 
and may claim that our study will result only in 
showing the inferior conclusions of natural reli- 
gion. Be it so, yet even natural religion is not a 
false prophet. But the distinction made is not 
a valid one. Unaided reason is a mere figment 



12 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

of thought. It does not really exist. God is 
in all minds. He is "the master light of all our 
seeing." The human reason is not hermetically 
sealed in a narrow inclosure. There are no fixed 
bounds where the natural leaves off and the su- 
pernatural begins. Choice spirits in all ages, who 
have been dedicated to righteousness, sensitive 
to truth, surrendered to the spirit, have caught 
sight of the gleaming framework of the world, 
and have been granted clear glimpses of God's 
way and will in human affairs. A contemplation 
of such insights cannot be without value. 

The method of investigation we have proposed 
has one limitation which must be clearly recog- 
nized, if we are rightly to understand our sub- 
ject. While we are perfectly correct in affirm- 
ing that religion is right relationship to God 
and our fellows, and that personal relations with 
God are entered into and maintained in much the 
same way that they are formed and continued 
with other persons, and while it is indisputable 
that human ties afford us our surest intelligence 
and best analogies of divine relationships ; yet 
there is something lying beyond all human 
experiences which, though incomprehensible, is 
supreme in its power of subduing the hearts of 
men. However rational we may make any doctrine 
of Christianity by explaining its conformity to 
the known laws of life, the hiding of its strength 
is not to be found where our explanation is most 



DOMINANT IDEAS 13 

lucid, but in that twilight land where faith wor- 
ships and into which the intellect cannot come 
with its tests and searchlights. The known is the 
safest and only interpreter of the unknown; but 
the dogmatist who imagines that all the mysteries 
and energies of religion lie inclosed within the 
little circle of his knowledge, and never lifts his 
eyes to the encompassing Light, whose glories, 
more mysterious than the darkness, must be to 
him forever inscrutable, has not learned where 
power dwelleth. 

A simple illustration may best make intelligi- 
ble and convincing the thought we would pre- 
sent. Should a chemist analyze a cupful of water 
dipped from the ocean, he would have definite 
knowledge of the constituent elements composing 
the sea. The same formula which would represent 
the contents of the cup would correctly explain 
the physical properties of the ocean. Yet has our 
chemist sufficiently comprehended the ocean when 
he has examined minutely the contents of his cup 
of water? Let him lift up his eyes and behold 
the sea stretching to the horizon ! Let him exalt 
his imagination, and conceive the many waters 

" Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime 
Dark heaving; " 

the ocean will then become to him 

" The image of Eternity — the throne 
Of the Invisible," 

and there will steal into his soul a sense of 



14 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

vastness and majesty of which he found no 
suggestion in the cup. The sublimity, the feeling 
of immensity which gives the ocean its chief 
spiritual significance, makes no deposit in the small 
quantity of water the chemist analyzed. 

In like manner we may study sin and God's 
forgiveness of it as interpreted by human analo- 
gies and be assured that we are pursuing a true 
and safe way, but how much of truth will escape 
our formulas ! It is God who forgives ! and we 
have an instinctive feeling that there are depths 
in his pardon which show no recognizable ele- 
ments in human mercy. It is God who loves ! 
and even the purest and noblest human love fails 
to image the glory of the divine. It is God who 
suffers! and the plummet of man's grief drops 
but a little way in the abyss of that agony. The 
cross of Christ must perforce be interpreted by 
human experience, as this affords us our only 
insight into its meaning, but the power of the 
cross lies in those depths and heights which tran- 
scend experience. All that we see gives us a sense 
of the unseen, and what brings the penitent to 
his knees, and then lifts him up and sends him 
on his way with exceeding joy, is not the clear- 
ness of his knowledge, but the compelling con- 
sciousness that there are abysses of sorrow which 
he cannot fathom, and vast ranges of grace 
which tower where his thought may not climb. 
The heart is awed in the presence of these un- 



DOMINANT IDEAS 15 

revealed mysteries, is tempered and exalted by 
them, and finds their incomprehensible greatness 
an unfailing source of strength. God has many 
things to say to us which have not yet been ut- 
tered in human experience. His silences are even 
more impressive to us than his speech. We may 
state succinctly what the work of Christ means 
to us, but it would be impertinent to claim that 
our experience comprehends all that redemption 
means to God. The length and breadth and 
height and depth of the divine love passeth 
knowledge. After we have examined and tabu- 
lated all that is possible we must still exclaim : — 

" Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways : 
And how small a whisper do we hear of him ! 
But the thunder of his power who can understand 7" 1 

Yet what we do not know does not diminish the 
value of what we may know, nor do the heights 
above us make it less important that we have 
sure foundations for our feet. The divine must 
always be best understood through the human. 
If we have sufficient reverence, " let knowledge 
grow from more to more." To understand what 
the finest, strongest minds have found to be the 
chief causes of disturbance in individual and 
social life, and the methods by which such alien- 
ations have been remedied, of necessity must 
greatly help us in understanding how the sun- 
dered ties between God and man are reunited. 

1 Job xxvi, 14. 



16 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

The Scriptures everywhere assume that our 
nature images and interprets God's; they affirm 
that the divine is analogous to human forgive- 
ness. We are commanded to forgive, even as 
God in Christ forgave us. The two actions are 
conceived as having a similar quality. In a re- 
markable passage it is recorded that Jesus said 
to his disciples, "Whose soever sins ye forgive, 
they are forgiven unto them." 1 This power has 
been grasped by the Koman church as an arbi- 
trary, ecclesiastical function ; but spiritually in- 
terpreted the promise means that if a sinner has 
all the antecedent conditions of forgiveness so 
that he can be received into Christian fellowship 
the pardon is valid everywhere in the moral uni- 
verse. True penitence merits the same reception 
wherever it touches the spiritual order. There is 
but one kind of forgiveness among moral beings, 
and a genuine human pardon is an interpretation 
of God's own action. What is thus remitted on 
earth is remitted in heaven, and what cannot be 
forgiven on earth is everywhere retained. 

1 John xx, 23. 



II 

SOME DEFINITIONS AND ASSERTIONS 



Show me a tenet which mankind have in every age been labouring 
to demonstrate ; in behalf of which genius has piled up structure after 
structure of massy argument ; in reference to which each period has 
been conscious of the failure of the preceding, and yet set itself to try 
another turn of skill ; let me see that this untiring industry has applied 
itself to the proof by opposite and distinctive methods, and after ex- 
ploring in vain every road of thought is fresh and unexhausted still ; 
and I at once recognise in that doctrine the very happiest order of 
truth, and precisely because, all men trying, no man can prove it. No 
amount, no duration of failure sufficing to throw it off, what shall I 
infer but that it is one of those things, not which the mind must be- 
lieve because it is proved, but which it must prove because it must 
believe. — James Maktineau. 



CHAPTER II 

SOME DEFINITIONS AND ASSERTIONS 

As inattention to definitions is ever a prolific 
source of mental confusion and obscure writ- 
ing, it will aid our investigation to tarry for a 
moment to make clear the sense in which some 
important words will be used. 

Reconciliation is the perfect repose of the mind 
in a restored and harmonious relationship. The 
persons reconciled are able to look upon the past, 
the present, and the future with joyful acquies- 
cence. We shall use the word to denote not only 
a knitting together of sundered ties, but also all 
those feelings of trust, complacency, gladness 
which are attendant upon complete union of 
spiritual beings. The word has both an objec- 
tive and a subjective meaning. It includes the 
outer relationship and the inner peace resulting 
from the renewal of friendship. It is thus a 
more comprehensive word than forgiveness, for 
we may forgive when we cannot contemplate 
past and present conditions with satisfaction. In 
the following pages forgiveness will be employed 
to express the free pardon of transgression. The 
forgiven one comes again into right relationships 



20 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

with the one injured, good will is unrestrained, 
and confidence is restored. When the thought is 
not only the renewed relationship but the per- 
fection of those feelings which result from two 
persons being in perfect accord, then the word 
employed will be reconciliation. Eeconciliation 
includes forgiveness, but has a still larger sig- 
nificance. 

Atonement signifies the method by which re- 
conciliation is established. In theology it is often 
used to describe merely the way forgiveness is 
attained; here it is employed as the term for ex- 
pressing all that has been done by God through 
Christ to establish perfect harmony between man 
and his Creator. It is the elect word to cover 
man's philosophy of Christ's work of redemp- 
tion. 

Atonement will be discussed, not as a three- 
hour transaction on Calvary, nor as a work per- 
formed during thirty-three radiant years. It 
began with time, and closes with the end of days. 
In this all-embracing sense the word will be em- 
ployed. 

The atonement may seem to some an outworn 
theme. The emphasis of the pulpit to-day is cer- 
tainly not put upon redemption and reconciliation. 
"It seems to me," writes Phillips Brooks, "as if 
the Christian world to-day was entering upon a 
movement, nay, had already entered upon and 
gone far in a movement which is certainly to be 



SOME DEFINITIONS AND ASSERTIONS 21 

no less profound and full of meaning than the 
great Protestant Reformation of three centuries 
ago. The final meaning really is the nearness of 
the soul of God to the soul of man, and of the 
soul of man to God. It is the meaning of the 
Incarnation." * Undoubtedly a result of our 
modern religious thinking has been to emphasize 
the constant and consecrating union of God with 
humanity, which discloses relationships which 
ever have been and ever shall be, and thus in- 
terprets the life of Christ as a symbol of a per- 
petual divine life with men, instead of an isolated 
event out of the range of human possibilities. 
This new movement teaches that the special in- 
carnation in Christ was in the interest of a uni- 
versal incarnation in humanity. It approaches 
the age-long problem of reconciliation with the 
mighty assertion of essential unity of the Divine 
and human natures and the ever-present good 
will of God, and it peremptorily discards all me- 
chanical and artificial methods of restoring right 
relations. This larger and deeper vision is an in- 
estimable gain. The chief danger in this inspir- 
ing new movement has already made itself mani- 
fest. Many religious leaders go no further than 
the affirmation that we are one with God by 
nature. To them the inherent dignity of man 
is the whole gospel, whereas the promise and 
power of the New Testament message is that we 

1 Allen's Life of Phillips Brooks, vol. ii, p. 502. 



22 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

may attain yet more, even an ethical and spir- 
itual unity with God through his grace freely 
offered. The burden of the gospel is that the 
Infinite Father is sparing no cost to bring us 
into this perfect oneness with himself. Reconcil- 
iation, ethical and spiritual union with God, 
must be the elemental significance of the new 
theology as of the old, if the newer thought is 
to have vitality. The Incarnation is not to be 
set over against the Atonement. It is as Atone- 
ment that the Incarnation reveals its fullest sig- 
nificance. Interest has not shifted from Calvary 
to Bethlehem ; Christianity's symbol is not to 
become the manger instead of the cross. The 
religious thinker must still take his stand at the 
cross, for it is there only that all the lines of re- 
demption converge and Christian verities are 
seen in the right perspective. Not what man is 
by nature, but what he can become through grace, 
is Christianity's enduring message. 

But why add another to the many explanations 
of the work of Christ in reconciliation ? Every 
great theory, propounded by wise men and de- 
fended by learned schools, has been overthrown. 
At best it was only a half truth, belittling rather 
than exalting the cross, making a supreme vital 
fact into a jejune and musty dogma at once hard 
to understand and barren of spiritual results. 
Every student will sympathize with Jowett's ex- 
clamation that " the cross of Christ is to be taken 



SOME DEFINITIONS AND ASSERTIONS 23 

up and borne : not to be turned into words, or 
made a theme of philosophical speculations." Ex- 
aggerated emphasis upon words and definitions 
has been fruitful of nothing but theological con- 
troversy. Those battlefields are the " arid Soudan 
of Christian teaching." Yet the blighting fault of 
ancient controversialists was not their efforts to 
interpret religious experiences, but a stubborn 
determination to force their formulas into another 
man's mind and soul. In truth we cannot put 
any two facts together without having a theory 
of their relationship. Much less can we bring the 
deep need of our souls face to face with the cross 
of Christ without having our minds powerfully 
stimulated to explain the wonderful significance 
of the regenerating experience. The intellect can 
no more refrain from seeking to comprehend the 
nature and meaning of the forces entering into 
the religious life, than a healthy stomach can 
receive food without attempting to assimilate it. 
If it is a choice between a good digestion and a 
bad one, we prefer the good. Similarly the mind 
must feed itself on the truths wrought out in life, 
and as the imperative necessity is laid upon it to 
interpret its experiences, it prefers the best possi- 
ble explanation. Truth is inseparable from life. 
It springs from it as light and power from the sun. 
Christian doctrines are the laws of the religious 
life, and are no more to be sneered down than are 
the scientific attempts to explain the methods of 



24 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

nature. It is only when what God hath joined to- 
gether man puts asunder, and truth is separated 
from life, that it becomes dead. It is the building 
of unsightly, mechanical superstructures upon 
isolated texts — and thus away from the soil 
where common life is spent — that has brought 
elaborate statements of Christian truth into dis- 
repute. 

But truth is not merely the product of life ; it 
reacts upon life and nourishes it as the leaves of 
a tree enrich the ground which produces them. 
The individual can get along very well with a 
genuine experience crudely interpreted, but the 
church has a gospel to proclaim. She has an 
appeal to make to the intelligence. She reaches 
men's hearts and wills through their minds, and 
she must choose between a language moulded by 
the best thought of the times and saturated with 
its noblest spirit, and a speech that is repellent 
through its barbaric crudity. No permanent, vig- 
orous, intelligent church or Christian civilization 
can be built up unless the facts and forces of the 
religious life can be interpreted in the accredited 
thought of the day. As a brilliant writer has 
stated, " A fact like the atonement can be sepa- 
rated from theory of some kind only by a suffu- 
sion of sentiment in the brain, some ethical anae- 
mia, or a scepticism of the spiritual intelligence." 
Thought surrounds every deed as the atmosphere 
envelops the earth. Doctrines are the grappling 



SOME DEFINITIONS AND ASSERTIONS 25 

irons which the mind throws to the crag above 
to help it in its steep ascent. Men are perma- 
nently organized and held together by truth, not 
by emotion. 



Ill 

HOMER 



Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; 

Round many western islands have I been 
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ; 

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : 
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 

When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien." 

Keats : On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. 



CHAPTER III 

HOMER 

In our study of literature with reference to 
the principles upon which reconciliation is ef- 
fected, we come first of all to the Iliad. It is 
not necessary for us to enter into the vexed ques- 
tion of authorship. The debate whether the 
swiftly moving story of wrath and valor was the 
song of blind Homer or a harmony of many 
singers, has no bearing upon our investigation. 
From one or many, it is a vivid picture of the 
conceptions, passions, customs of a primitive 
people. It is the clear voice of an epoch. Fortu- 
nately also it was not written with the ulterior 
purpose of exploiting any theory either of poli- 
tics or religion. Virgil is the poet of the Roman 
Empire, constraining the flow of his song to 
glorify Italy and the great Augustus. Dante 
puts into a form of vivid and deathless beauty 
the august theology of the Middle Ages. Milton 
avowedly seeks to justify the ways of God to 
man. Homer, on the contrary, is unhampered by 
any of the necessities of an advocate. He simply is 
telling a story, and this permits him to give free 
rein to his artistic and ethical impulses. His sole 



30 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

restraint is that he must paint so true a picture of 
men and gods that he shall not violate the best 
instincts of his hearers. When he treats of that 
ever-present theme in literature, reconciliation, 
he has no conscious purpose of framing a theo- 
logy or of pointing a moral. It is because in 
his glowing pictures of life he assumes certain 
fundamental principles as essential to honorable 
living that his testimony has so great worth. The 
Iliad makes no pretence of being a history of 
the Trojan War. It is merely a chapter torn from 
the record of that prolonged struggle. When the 
last book is finished devoted Troy is still standing ; 
effeminate Paris holds in full possession Helen's 
fatal beauty; the petulant Achilles, whose death 
has been plainly predicted, rests in his tent. No- 
thing is complete but the tale of Achilles' deadly 
wrath, its woeful consequences, and his final re- 
conciliation with Agamemnon. 

Sin, Retribution, Reconciliation, — this is the 
theme of the Iliad. Not sin in our modern sense, 
indeed ; but still a foolish infraction of right 
personal relations entailing fateful consequences. 
The very first lines strike the keynote and unfold 
the plot. 

" O Goddess ! sing the wrath of Peleus' son, 
Achilles ; sing the deadly wrath that brought 
Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept 
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave 
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air, — 
For so had Jove appointed, — from the time 



HOMER 31 

When the two chiefs, Atrides, king of men, 
And great Achilles, parted first as foes." 1 

The main features of the story which runs 
through the twenty-four books are these : Chry- 
ses, priest of Apollo, comes to Agamemnon, king 
of the Greeks, who is beleaguering Troy, and 
asks the return of his captive daughter, offering 
at the same time an appropriate ransom. The 
warrior gruffly refuses, whereupon the priest prays 
to the god Apollo, who in anger showers down 
for nine days his pestilence-bearing arrows on 
the Greeks. The seer Calchas declares that the 
wrath of the god will not be appeased until 
Agamemnon restores to the aged priest his 
daughter. At this announcement — 

"Wide ruling Agamemnon greatly chafed. 
His gloomy heart was full of wrath, his eyes 
Sparkled like fire." 2 

Yet to save his people from destruction he gives 
up the "fair-cheeked maid," Chryseis,and in what 
he afterwards describes as a fury sent by Fate, 
takes from Achilles for a recompense the maiden 
Briseis, whom that impetuous warrior dearly 
loved and who had been awarded to him as a 
prize of war. In sullen anger Achilles retired to 
his tent and refused to have further part in the 
war. From that hour the siege went against the 
Greeks and they were driven to their ships, expect- 

1 Bryant's translation. 

2 Ibid., book i, 134. 



32 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ing that on the morrow crested Hector with the 
Trojan host would vanquish them and burn their 
fleet. The stress of battle exhausted Agamemnon's 
anger and cleared his vision, so that he perceived 
his fateful folly in alienating Achilles. In a 
council of war the king acknowledges his fault 
and offers to appease the wrath of the offended 
chief — 

" With gifts of priceless worth. Before you all 
I number them, — seven tripods which the fire 
Hath never touched, six talents of pure gold, 
And twenty shining caldrons, and twelve studs 
Of hardy frame, victorious in the race. 



Seven faultless women skilled in household arts, 
Damsels in beauty who excel their sex. 
These I bestow and with them I will send 
Her whom I took away, — Briseis, pure." 1 

Moreover Achilles was to have the first chance 
in the division of the spoil of Troy ; he might 
choose twice ten young Trojan women, beauti- 
ful beyond their sex, save Helen ; he might be- 
come Agamemnon's son-in-law, having the choice 
of the king's three daughters, and instead of en- 
dowing the bride, Agamemnon would give as a 
dowry seven cities with thronged streets. 

Three of Achilles' dearest friends, Ulysses, 
Ajax, and Phoenix, bear to him this offer of re- 
conciliation ; but the doughty warrior, still nour- 
ishing his hurt, refuses to be appeased : ■ — 

1 Bryant's trans., ix, 144 ff. 



HOMER 33 

" I leave him to himself 
To perish. All-providing Jupiter 
Hath made him mad. I hate his gifts; I hold 
In utter scorn the giver." 1 

The battle is again renewed, and the Greeks are 
driven once more to their ships by the Trojans, 
who attempt to set fire to the fleet. Patroclus, 
Achilles' bosom friend, can endure inactivity no 
longer, and tearfully asks leave to don Achilles' 
armor and lead his myrmidons to the relief of 
the Greeks. Permission is given, and he per- 
forms prodigies of valor, carrying the battle to 
the very walls of Ilium, where he is slain. 

Achilles is inconsolable at this loss, and the 
desire for revenge and the knowledge of the sore 
straits of his former comrades-in-arms burn up 
his sullen resentment. 

" Along the beach the great Achilles went, 
Calling with mighty shouts the Grecian chiefs. 2 " 

They assembled in council, and Achilles re- 
nounced his enmity. When Agamemnon pressed 
the offer of gifts upon him, he treated it as a 
matter of small importance. But this the judg- 
ment of the king would not allow. The maid Bri- 
seis was restored and with her were given the 
presents Agamemnon had promised. Donning 
the armor forged by Vulcan, Achilles led the at- 
tack, defeated Hector, and dragged the body at 
his chariot wheels. With the pathetic picture of 

1 Bryant's trans., ix, 468 ff. iul 2 Ibid., xix, 47. 



34 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the aged Priam begging the mangled form of 
his son and bearing it away by night from the 
tent of the victor, the poem ends. 

The factors upon which this reconciliation de- 
pended are very evident. Both chieftains were 
hot-tempered and in the wrong. There could be 
no reuniting of their severed friendship until 
each was brought to a better frame of mind. 
This was accomplished in both by seeing the dis- 
astrous consequences of their folly. Agamemnon 
saw his army defeated through lack of Achilles' 
aid, and Achilles beheld the destruction of his 
former friends and the death of Patroclus, dear 
to him as his own life. The fearful results en- 
tailed by this stubborn foolishness brought both 
to repentance. Both offered public confession in 
the council of the chiefs. Agamemnon made every 
amend in his power, and Achilles did the same by 
entering the battle, although the gods had fore- 
told that it meant for him certain death. 

There was on the part of each repentance be- 
cause of the direful results of their wrong, a 
public confession, and an earnest endeavor to 
make full amends. Yet their reconciliation was 
shadowed by the thought that full atonement 
could not be made. Achilles' deadly wrath had 
indeed brought — 

" Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept 
To Hades many a valiant soul." 

For this loss no restitution could be made. 



HOMER 35 

Kecon cilia tion between an offended Deity and 
sinful man proceeds on the same principles. The 
Supreme in Homer is a nature deity whose char- 
acter is expressed in all the forces of the physical 
and moral world, both good and evil. He is the 
source of all things. He has many manifestations, 
revealing himself in the nine great Olympians, in 
the smaller gods, in Fate, in laws which make 
for righteousness, and in whimsical, arbitrary de- 
crees. 

With such a conception of the Supreme, sin 
certainly cannot have its full Christian meaning. 
It is rather a blind folly which leads man to his 
undoing. Often it comes from God himself, for 
Agamemnon declares that the cause of his of- 
fense against Achilles was from above : — 

" Yet was not I the cause, 
But Jupiter, and Fate, and she who walks 
In darkness, dread Erinnys. It was they 
Who filled my mind with fury in the hour 
When from Achilles I bore off his prize. 
What could I do ? A deity prevails 
In all things, Ate, mighty to destroy, 
Daughter of Jove, and held in awe by all. " x 

But when one foolishly does wrong, either from 
willfulness or because entangled in Ate's net, 
how shall he atone to the heavenly powers ? The 
first book of the Iliad gives an interesting answer. 
Agamemnon had angered Apollo by refusing to 
hear the prayer of his priest for the restoration of 

1 Bryant's trans., xix, 103 ff. 



36 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the captive maiden Chryseis. The consequence 
of the wrong in the eyes of the king is twofold, 
— defilement and guilt. To be rid of the first 
the warrior purified the camp and cast the pollu- 
tion in the sea. It was the same instinct as that 
which caused the Hebrew to send the scapegoat 
into the wilderness, and which the Christian ex- 
presses by the water of baptism. To remove the 
guilt they made every possible amends. Ulysses 
restored the fair-cheeked maiden to her father, 
sacrifices were offered, and the youths chanted 
forth high anthems to the Archer of the skies, 
who, as he listened to the strains, softened his 
stern mood. 

In this simple incident we have a very clear 
setting forth of the primitive impulses which 
arise when one would atone for sin. When the 
offense is between man and man, there is repent- 
ance in view of the consequences of the fault, 
acknowledgment, and such restitution as is pos- 
sible. When the evil is against God there is a 
sense on the part of the offender of the defile- 
ment of his sin. He casts its filth away, and then 
performs a deed intended to exalt the majesty of 
the divine government which he has dishonored. 



IV 
^SCHYLUS 



The old Injustice joys to breed 
Her young, instinct with villanous deed ; 
The young her destined hour will find 
To rush in mischief on mankind : 
She too in Ate's murky cell 
Brings forth the hideous child of hell, 
A burden to the offended sky, 
The power of bold impiety. 

But Justice bids her ray divine 
E'en on the low-roofed cottage shine ; 
And beams her glories on the life 
That knows not fraud, nor ruffian strife. 
The gorgeous glare of gold, obtained 
By foul polluted hands, disdained 
She leaves, and with averted eyes 
To humbler, holier mansions flies ; 
And looking through the times to come, 
Assigns each deed its righteous doom. 

iEsCHYLUS. 



CHAPTER IV 

^SCHYLUS 

We turn from Homer — with his rudimen- 
tary moral impulses — to iEschylus and Sopho- 
cles, through whose eyes the Greeks first saw 
clearly the inexorableness and grandeur of that 
moral order which penetrates and constrains hu- 
man action. During the intervening centuries the 
nation has grown in wisdom, and we shall find 
profounder views and more reasoned judgments. 
The rise of the Greek drama, like the develop- 
ment of the stage in Shakespeare's time, was the 
result of a thorough awakening of the national 
mind in the presence of impending calamity. 
The threatened invasion of the Persian hordes, 
checked at Marathon and Salamis, so deeply 
stirred the Greeks that their sobered and exult- 
ant life could not but register itself in phenome- 
nal thoughts and deeds. Great literature follows 
closely in the wake of great events. The stimu- 
lated patriotism and the steadied and enriched 
moral consciousness of the people found their 
highest interpretation and their surest guidance 
upon the stage. The Greek theatre at its best 
was the pulpit of the day. It not only expressed 



40 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the prof oundest emotions of the nation, it turned 
them into right channels of thought and action. 
What the prophets were to the Hebrew, the dra- 
matists were to the Greek. They revealed the 
moral significance of the supreme events of 
the national history, and set forth in vivid and 
impressive scenes the fundamental truths of reli- 
gion. 

The most conspicuous names associated with 
the Greek stage are those of iEschylus, Sopho- 
cles, and Euripides. iEschylus was the founder 
of the drama ; Sophocles carried it to its culmi- 
nation ; with Euripides it began to decline. As 
the latter, with all his unquestioned power, sees 
nothing of religious significance that does not 
find more powerful expression in the first two, 
we shall confine our attention to them. Both are 
mighty preachers of righteousness. 

Of the seventy-eight plays which iEschylus 
wrote only seven have come down to us. We can- 
not but feel this to be an irreparable loss. His mind 
dwelt habitually in the loftiest realm of moral 
truth, and what was native to him he expressed 
in words and scenes of such simplicity and gran- 
deur that those forgotten plays refute Emerson's 
confident generalization : — 

" One accent of the Holy Ghost 
A heedless world has never lost." 

iEschylus connected his weightier plays in a 
series, because only thus could he worthily dis- 



^SCHYLUS 41 

close the final working out of his principles. For- 
tunately, of the seven plays which we possess, 
three, Agamemnon, Chsephorae, and the Eumeni- 
des form a trilogy, commonly called the " Ores- 
teia." This great trilogy is the dramatist's master- 
piece, and as it was not written until two years 
before his death, contains his matured convictions. 
Before considering its architectonic thought we 
may profitably recall the outlines of the mythical 
tale upon which the drama is based. 

The wife of Atreus, king of Argos, was wronged 
by Thyestes, his brother. Atreus, pretending to 
forgive him, invited him to a banquet at which 
was served to the guests the flesh of Thyestes* 
own children. The horror-stricken father invoked 
a curse upon the house of Atreus, praying that 
all might perish even as had his own children. 
The two sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Me- 
nelaus, married the daughters of Leda, Clytem- 
nestra and Helen. Paris, enamored of Helen's 
beauty, violated the laws of hospitality and car- 
ried her off to Troy. To avenge the deed, Aga- 
memnon led the hosts of the Greeks against the 
city of Priam. Agamemnon, though a great king, 
was not without his frailties, and one day in 
hunting shot a stag sacred to Artemis, boasting 
that he was a better hunter than she. The 
angered goddess caused foul weather to delay 
the fleet at Aulis many days, and the prophet 
Calchas announced that the ships could not sail 



42 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

unless the king offered up his daughter Iphigenia 
in sacrifice. This Agamemnon reluctantly did ; 
the fleet sailed; and after ten years he returned 
to his home victorious over the Trojans. On his 
arrival he found that his wife Clytemnestra had 
been unfaithful to him with iEgisthus, son of 
Thyestes. Clytemnestra sternly chided him for 
their daughter's death, and in revenge slew him 
in his bath. Orestes, their son, at the bidding 
of Apollo, killed his mother, but was immediately 
pursued by the avenging Furies, until his case 
was tried before a jury of Athenians, and Pallas 
Athene pronounced him cleared of his guilt. The 
enraged Furies were propitiated by the promise 
of high honors to be given by the Athenians, and 
so were no longer Erinnyes, Furies ; but Eumen- 
ides, gracious goddesses. Thus the curse upon 
the house of Atreus was stayed. 

To us this may seem an idle tale. To iEschy- 
lus these traditions of his country embodied 
truths of utmost importance to its perpetuity; 
they were the means, ready at hand, of impress- 
ing the sternest and most august moral teachings ; 
they offered a superb vehicle for the communica- 
tion of his message, for were not these very tra- 
ditions created and moulded by the thought and 
experience of centuries? Did they not express 
life in its essential features as the common people 
believed it? How far the poet credited the his- 
torical validity of the narrative he employed is 



JESCHYLUS 43 

unimportant to inquire. The immemorial laws of 
God which they visualized he believed with the 
full intensity of his nature. 

We shall best understand iEschylus' conception 
of sin, retribution, and reconciliation in the light 
of his idea of the nature of God. We have no 
reason to suppose that the poet questioned the 
existence of the gods of his country, whether su- 
pernal or infernal, but his mind was too great and 
sane to rest in such a conglomerate multiplicity. 
He found a higher unity in a Supreme Righteous- 
ness to which both gods and men were subject. 
Of this Eternal Reality Zeus is the loftiest mani- 
festation and therefore worthy of all honor. In 
"Prometheus Bound/' Zeus is sketched as an in- 
solent usurper, but in " Agamemnon " the poet's 
thought is loftier. 

" Zeus — if to the Unknown 

That name of many names seem good — 
Zeus, upon Thee I call. 

Through the mind's every road 
I passed, but vain are all, 
Save that which names thee, Zeus, the Highest One." x 

According to the mythology of the day, which 
iEschylus used, Zeus was the third ruler of the 
gods and men. Uranus had been overthrown by 
Cronus, and he in turn by Zeus. The thought 
hidden under the mythological veil is that the 
first stage of the world's history was the reign 
of physical forces, followed by a period of har- 

1 Morshead's trans. 



44 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

mony and joy — the golden age, — but the pre- 
sent is a day of good and evil over which is an 
inexorable divine government. This Power Su- 
preme may as well be called Zeus as by any other 
name. But whatever the representative word 
chosen, the highest is Righteous. Naught can 
escape his open-eyed justice. 

" For never with unheedful eyes, 

When slaughtered thousands bleed, 
Did the just powers of Heaven regard 

The carnage of th' ensanguined plain. 
The ruthless and oppressive power 
May triumph for its little hour; 

Full soon with all their vengeful train 

The sullen Furies ride, 
Break his fell force, and whirl him down 
Through life's dark paths, unpitied and unknown." 1 

The same unerring sight that observes the multi- 
tude detects the individual in the violation of the 
right : — 

" To Troy the shining mischief came ; 

Before her, young-eyed pleasures play ; 
But in the rear with steadfast aim 

Grim-visaged Vengeance marks his prey." 2 

These afflictions which inevitably follow wrong- 
doing are not merely the recoil of the disturbed 
equilibrium of the moral world ; they chasten and 
instruct man. The Supreme is benignant as well 
as righteous. 

" 'T is Zeus alone who shows the perfect way 
Of knowledge. He hath ruled 
Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled. 

Potter's trans. 2 Ibid. 



^SCHYLUS 45 

In visions of the night, like dropping rain, 
Descend the many memories of pain 

Before the spirit's sight ; through tears and dole 
Comes wisdom o'er the unwitting soul — 

A boon, I wot, of all Divinity, 
That holds its sacred throne in strength, above the sky ! " L 

Nowhere in the early literature of the world, if 
we except perhaps a passage in Ezekiel (chap, 
xviii), is there a more majestic assertion of the 
justice of God than in the third chorus of the 
Agamemnon. 

To iEschylus divine justice was not a vague 
spiritual intuition, a magnificent poetical gen- 
eralization. It was attested by two infallible 
witnesses, — the law of heredity and the provi- 
dential retribution disclosed in history. 

The mystery of heredity has been of absorb- 
ing interest to men from far antiquity. No sooner 
does a man begin to exercise his conscious 
freedom than he finds himself restrained like 
Hamlet by limitations of temperament, or like 
Cassius hurried into indiscretions by a "rash 
humour" for which he feels he is not responsible. 
Whence came these intractable elements, these 
fatal weaknesses? What malignant fiend threw 
the dark drop into the red current of our blood? 
By what process can it be worked out? The 
wisdom of to-day explains the mystery by what 
is called a law of heredity. Yet our wisest teach- 
ers feel that here they are using words without 

1 Morshead's trans. 



46 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

much knowledge. The fact of heredity we know, 
but the methods of its operation are as veiled 
to us as to our fathers. In mediaeval times this 
fateful law was referred to as the baleful influ- 
ence of the stars. What other meaning could 
the mystic movements of these dim lamps have 
than the weaving of the destiny of man? In the 
ancient world weaknesses and fierce propensities 
to evil were the judgments of God, sent upon 
the children for the sins of the fathers. This 
idea received increased emphasis and justifica- 
tion from the prevalent notions of the submer- 
gence of the individual in the family and state. 
The rights of the person are of modern growth. 
In classic days he was inextricably bound in 
national and social connections. His ancestors' 
sins were his. That he actually bore the results 
in his own fortunes was an easily observed fact; 
that this was right the dominating social theories 
of the time maintained. In Hebrew literature 
this indissoluble connection between the genera- 
tions found monumental utterance in the words : 
"For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, vis- 
iting the iniquity of the fathers upon the child- 
ren unto the third and fourth generation of them 
that hate me." 

The aspect of hereditary evil which engaged 
-ZEschylus' attention was not that which would 
engross a modern writer, its deteriorating effects 
on the character of the offender. Neither was it 



^SCHYLUS 47 

the essential guilt of the sin itself. The Greek 
mind saw the horror of sin in its social results. 
Individual transgression called down the retribu- 
tive justice of God, not merely upon the criminal, 
but upon the family and state. It blights the 
coming generations ; it spreads its contagion be- 
yond the wrong-doer. 

To reveal the hereditary curse of sin by tra- 
cing its destructive course down through the 
house of Atreus is evidently a main purpose 
with iEschylus. When Cassandra, led as Aga- 
memnon's captive, approaches the palace, her 
clairvoyant soul feels the chill horror of the 
doom which hangs over the place. Furies seem 
to possess the mansion, — 

" and in horrid measures chant 
The first base deed; recording with abhorrence 
Th' adulterous lust that stained a brother's bed." * 

Of this same ancestral shadow the chorus speaks 
in stately measure in the "Libation-Pourers:" — 

" Alas, the inborn curse that haunts our house, 
Of Ate's blood-stained scourge the tuneless sound! 
Alas, the deep, insufferable doom, 
The staunchless wound! " 2 

Yet this " insufferable doom " is not something 
fickle and capricious ; it is a well understood law 
of nature. 

" One base deed, with prolific power, 
Like its cursed stock engenders more ; 
But to the just, with blooming grace, 
Still flourishes a beauteous race." 3 

1 Potter's trans. 2 Morshead's trans. 3 Potter's trans. 



48 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

The fierce, lawless blood of Atreus, who was will- 
ing to serve to his brother the horrid stew of his 
own children's limbs, transmitted to posterity, 
could not fail to break forth in dreadful crimes. 
But although iEschylus represents this law of 
ancestral evil as working with the inevitableness 
of Fate, he never trespassed upon the domain of 
man's individual freedom. The wrath of the gods 
does not fall upon the devoted person until he 
has himself committed a sin which lets loose the 
impending avalanche. In some act of freedom he 
identifies himself with the guilt of his ancestors 
before he is swept into the black stream of in- 
herited doom. It was when Agamemnon killed 
the sacred stag of Artemis and insolently boasted 
that he was the better hunter that the woe fell 
on him, — 

" for his injurious pride 
Filled for this house the cup of desolation 
Fated himself to drain it to the dregs. '* 1 

" By my choice, my choice, 
I freely sinned" [exclaims Prometheus]. 

" Because I gave 
Honour to mortals, I have yoked my soul 
To this compelling fate." 2 

The other formative thought of the " Oresteia" 
is the retributive judgments of God as seen in 
history. Sin cannot be confined to the one guilty ; 
it goes down through the generations ; it also 

1 Potter's trans. 

2 Prometheus Bound, E. B. Browning's trans. 



^SCHYLUS 49 

sweeps in devastating circles out into the world. 
The whole Trojan war was caused by sin, and thus 
becomes an illustration of divine justice. Paris 
violated the laws of hospitality and carried Helen 
in triumph to Troy. No evil at first seemed to 
result. No keen-eyed justice seemed to observe 
the crime. 

" To Ilion's towers in wanton state 

With speed she wings her easy way; 
Soft gales obedient round her wait, 
And pant on the delighted sea." 1 

Yet God is not mocked ; vengeance soon awakes. 

" But, such the doom of Jove, 
Vindictive round her nuptial bed, 
With threat'ning mien and footstep dread, 
Rushes, to Priam and his state severe, 

To rend the bleeding heart his stern delight, 
And from the bridal eye to force the tear, 
Erinnys, rising from the realms of night." 2 

But iEschylus traces this retributive justice to 
a finer issue than the strife of nations. In the 
ancient world the family and state were the two 
most important institutions. Each had its rights 
and each its limitations. Because each was lim- 
ited it was partial, and being partial it was blind, 
and being blind it stumbled across its boundaries 
and trenched on the rights of the other. With 
each infringement of right there was an inevita- 
ble retribution, an expiatory penalty, which to 
iEschylus was a powerful witness to the sleepless 
vigilance and the minutely exacting justice of 

1 Potter's trans. 2 Potter's trans. 



50 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

God. Although Agamemnon is a great king, dig- 
nified, humble-minded, clear-seeing, powerful on 
the field and at the council board, and ever ready 
to subject all personal desires to the demands of 
his office, yet for his slight sin at Aulis he must 
sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. A King's stern 
duty to avert the wrath of the gods, so that 
the expedition against Troy may proceed, com- 
pels him to make the dreadful offering. But in 
slaying his tearful, pleading daughter, while he 
has propitiated the gods, he has sinned against 
the family. These rights are also sacred, and this 
violation demands an adequate expiation. In 
the person of Clytemnestra the avenging justice 
of the home secures its satisfaction, and the vic- 
torious king returning to his violated hearth is 
slain in his bath. While securing justice for it- 
self, the family has sinned against the state by 
killing the king, so that although the curtain 
may fall upon the " Agamemnon " when the king's 
crime has been expiated, it must rise upon the 
" Libation-Pourers " to show how the new offense 
has its atonement. In this second play Orestes, 
the prince, returns and at the bidding of Apollo 
slays his mother, who thus by her own death 
expiates the crime of murdering her husband. 
Again the curtain may fall, for justice has been 
done. Yet a new crime, as horrible as the others, 
has been perpetrated, — a son has reddened his 
hand in his mother's blood, and even though he 



-ESCHYLUS 51 

did it at the command of a god and in the inter- 
ests of justice, such an act of violence must meet 
with a fierce recoil. In the " Eumenides " the fu- 
ries of a murdered mother pursue the frenzied 
Orestes even to the altar of Pallas, where he 
goes at the command of Phoebus. Here the 
prince pleads the justice of his cause, and the Erin- 
nyes assert their rights, Pallas restores the equi- 
librium of the moral order and stays the havoc 
of the crime whose curse has passed from father 
to son by acquitting Orestes and bestowing ex- 
traordinary honor upon the Erinnyes. The sin 
has been expiated because its penalties have 
fallen upon a righteous man, and justice is ap- 
peased when its majesty is maintained. 

We now see clearly the structual thoughts of 
this mighty trilogy. The Supreme Righteous- 
ness, whose highest manifestation is called Zeus, 
wise, beneficent, scrupulously just, foreordains 
all things. Yet sin is of human volition. Not 
until man takes the first wrong step does he link 
himself to his dreadful fate. Each sin is surely 
punished. 

" It is well of these tales to tell ; for the sword in the grasp 

of the Right 
With a cleaving, a piercing blow to the innermost heart doth 

smite, 
And the deed unlawfully done is not trodden down nor forgot, 
When the sinner outsteppeth the law and heedeth the high 

God not ; 
But justice hath planted the anvil, and destiny forgeth the 

sword 



52 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

That shall smite in her chosen time ; by her is the child re- 
stored ; 

And, darkly devising, the Fiend of the house, world-cursed, 
will repay 

The price of the blood of that slain, that was shed in a bygone 
day." 1 

Each slightest sin must be expiated. 

" Blood for blood, and blow for blow — 
Thou shalt reap as thou dost sow ; 
Age to age with hoary wisdom 
Speaketh thus to man." 2 

" 'T is robber robbed, and slayer slain ; for though 
Of ttimes it lag, with measured blow for blow, 

Vengeance prevaileth 
While great Jove lives. Who breaks the close-linked woe 

Which heaven entaileth ? " 3 

The inexorable Righteousness manifests itself by 
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the child- 
ren unto the third and fourth generation, and 
by the retributive processes of history. Sin, 
therefore, in the teaching of ^Eschylus has a 
twofold aspect. It entails hereditary evil and 
embroils institutions and nations. If man were 
simply a member of a family, personal and he- 
reditary suffering would end the consequences of 
transgression ; but he is a citizen, a representative 
of a nation, and his actions may involve states 
and races unconnected by ties of blood. 

How shall the hereditary and social curse of 

1 The Libation-Pourers, Morshead's trans. 

2 The Libation-Pourers, Blackie's trans. 

3 Agamemnon, Blackie's trans. 



iESCHYLUS 53 

sin be stayed? How shall the divine justice be 
satisfied ? 

The hereditary blight is stayed when its pen- 
alties fall upon a righteous man. Orestes had 
not identified himself with the bad blood of his 
house. He had acted under a sense of duty, with 
perfect self-control and in obedience to the com- 
mand of Apollo. Whatever stain there was upon 
him — and the murder of his mother made him 
guilty of a sin against the home — was washed 
away by his pains and lustrations, and when after 
many wanderings he came to the temple of Pallas 
Athene for justification he pleaded : — 

" No guilt of blood 
Is on my soul, nor is my hand unclean." x 

The forensic justification came when a jury of 
Athenians and Pallas, representing human and 
divine justice, declared him innocent, and the 
Erinnyes were appeased by having suitable honors 
paid to them. His justification is based on his 
rectitude, his obedience to the divine commands, 
his sufferings and lustrations, together with the 
honors rendered to the Erinnyes. By these the 
majesty of the divine government has been suffi- 
ciently upheld to allow Orestes to go free. 

The curse, so far as it affects one's judicial stand- 
ing before God, having been allayed, how is the 
tainted blood purified ? This hereditary evil that 
has broken out in so many directions, how is it 

1 Eumenides, Plumptre's trans. 



54 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

checked? By the moral will of a good man. Ores- 
tes inherited murderous, passionate blood from 
both sides of his house, but he held it in subjec- 
tion. In his freedom he yielded only to high mo- 
tives, he carefully obeyed the will of the gods ; 
and under this severe self-control the hot blood 
cooled, the evil was overcome by good. That the 
solution of iEschylus is right is a matter of daily 
observation. Man inherits from God as well as 
from the brute. The old conflict of St. Michael 
and the Dragon is reenacted in many breasts with 
the same results. The ape and the tiger die, and 
the good wins a lasting victory. 

The vicarious suffering of a good man is effi- 
cacious also in staying the clash between the 
family and the state. Orestes is prince as well as 
son. He represents both the institutions which 
have been wronged by the havoc of Agamem- 
non's sin. In him they both can be reconciled. 
His righteousness honors both institutions and 
maintains their majesty unimpaired. There can 
be perfect divine forgiveness because hereditary 
evil has been overcome in a good man, because, 
being also representative of all the interests in- 
jured, he reconciles them in himself, and because 
his suffering righteousness and the homage paid 
to the messengers of justice maintain the author- 
ity of the divine law. In making a righteous 
man staunch the wound made by sin, iEschylus 
is not indulging in a passing fancy. With him 



^SCHYLUS 55 

this is a settled principle. When Prometheus is 
bound to the rocks because of his defiance of 
Zeus, Hermes says to him : — 

" Do not look 
For any end moreover to this curse, 
Or ere some god appear to accept thy pangs 
On his own head vicarious, and descend 
With unreluctant step the darks of hell 
And gloomy abysses around Tartarus." * 

One cannot read these lines, written four hundred 
years before Calvary, without thinking of the vi- 
carious Sufferer who being righteous tasted death 
for every man. 

1 Prometheus Bound, E. B. Browning's trans. 



V 

SOPHOCLES 



Grant me henceforth, ye powers divine, 

In virtue's purest paths to tread ! 

In every word, in every deed, 
May sanctity of manners ever shine ! 

Obedient to the laws of Jove, 

The laws descended from above, 
Which, not like those by feeble mortals given, 

Buried in dark oblivion lie, 

Or worn by time decay, and die, 
But bloom eternal like their native heaven ! 

Sophocles. 



CHAPTER V 

SOPHOCLES 

From iEschylus the crown of tragic poetry 
passed to a man scarcely less smitten with a 
sense of the august grandeur of the moral law, 
and far more richly gifted in ability to analyze 
character and to delineate human passions. While 
iEschylus was absorbed in gazing at those unseen, 
invincible powers working so steadily for right- 
eousness that man seemed scarcely more than a 
puppet in their hands, Sophocles turned his eyes 
to the deep places of the heart, and with unri- 
valed skill portrayed the struggles of the inner 
life. He was the Shakespeare of the ancient stage, 
broad in his sympathies, human in his interests, 
and unexcelled in the portrayal of the passions of 
the heart. Of the hundred plays which he wrote 
only seven have come down to us. In them we 
find uttered with impressive power the same es- 
sential truths of the inviolability of the moral 
law, and the sure recoil of evil upon the guilty, 
which were the inspiration of the masterpieces 
of his predecessor. In " Trachinise," " Philoc- 
tetes," " Ajax," "Electra," " Antigone " we find 



60 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the same collision between different rights, — 
involving the same action and interaction of 
guilt and penalty, until at last the offended 
rights are expiated and find their common peace 
in the Eight. We shall dwell upon only two of 
the plays, " OEdipus Tyrannus " and " (Edipus 
Coloneus," because in them the additional truth 
is emphasized that blunders are as disastrous as 
crimes, and that a mistake may disturb the moral 
order as violently as a great sin. It is the teach- 
ing of Sophocles concerning the expiation de- 
manded by eternal righteousness from the unin- 
tentional offender, and the ways in which this 
sure justice atones to the blunderer for his awful 
sufferings, that give to these dramas their strange 
fascination. 

The familiar yet always pathetic story of (Edi- 
pus runs as follows: Laius, king of Thebes, has 
been forewarned by the oracle that he will die 
by the hand of his own son. When his wife, 
Jocasta, gave birth to a boy, the alarmed king 
pierced the child's feet, bound them with thongs, 
and exposed him on Mt. Cithserus. Having been 
found by a shepherd of the king of Corinth, 
(Edipus was brought up in the palace as the 
king's son. Learning from an oracle that he was 
doomed to slay his father and marry his mother, 
he fled from the home of his shepherd father and 
mother, that he might be guiltless of the dread- 
ful crime. On the road between Delphi and 



SOPHOCLES 61 

Daulis the wanderer met his real father, Laius, 
and in a quarrel unintentionally slew him. Com- 
ing to Thebes, he found that devoted city plagued 
by the Sphinx, who, seated upon a rock in the 
neighborhood, propounded a riddle to every The- 
ban passing by, and if the traveler could not 
answer it, killed him. (Edipus solved the riddle, 
and the Sphinx destroyed herself. For his reward 
he received the kingdom and the hand of the 
queen, Jocasta, in marriage. Thus while seeking 
with all his heart to avoid evil and serve his fel- 
lows, his very efforts to escape have made him the 
slayer of his father and the incestuous husband 
of his mother. Yet a guiltless blunder may be as 
morally disastrous as a deliberate offense. There 
is evil in the city and a plague falls upon it, de- 
stroying the fruits of the earth, the cattle of the 
fields, and the race of men, causing Hades to en- 
large her borders. (Edipus, ignorant of his mis- 
take, assures the terror-stricken people of his sym- 
pathy and pronounces a solemn curse upon the 
murderer, dooming him to exile when he is found. 
In his energetic endeavor to ferret him out he 
learns, to his utter horror, that he himself is the 
blood-stained criminal, — that he is a guilty par- 
ricide and the husband of his mother. Jocasta, 
overwhelmed by the awful truth, commits suicide 
to expiate her crime ; but the agonized (Edipus 
realized that death would be no release and no 
atonement. 



62 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

" Descending to the dead, I know not how 
I could have borne to gaze upon my sire, 
Or my unhappy mother ; for to them 
Crimes dark as mine not death can e'er atone." 



Over the dead body of his mother he tears out 
his eyes that they may not see his sufferings and 
the dreadful deeds he has wrought. Then he goes 
forth from the country a homeless exile. 

In recounting this frightful tale Sophocles is 
too skillful an artist to make it one of unmitigated 
horror. He shows that (Edipus is not entirely 
undeserving of his punishment. Prosperity has 
to a degree hardened his heart, making him im- 
perious and headstrong, so that his sufferings 
are not simply the fierce scourgings of Fate, but 
minister to his final perfection. 

When the curtain falls we have beheld a noble 
man, through his blunders enmeshed in the toils 
of retributive justice, in his very efforts to do 
good sinking deeper into the net, and by his un- 
avoidable mistakes bringing fiery disaster to those 
whom he would help. 

Yet the gods are just. The punishment has 
been greater than the guilt, and even if the recoil 
against evil was inevitable, the blow that fell upon 
the unintentional offender was heavier than he 
deserved. The gods must atone to (Edipus for 
the severity of the penalty. Justice must be done 
to him, and the "(Edipus Tyrannus" must be 
followed by " (Edipus Coloneus." 



SOPHOCLES 63 

Between " (Edipus Tyrannus " and " (Edipus 
Coloneus " several years have elapsed. The blind 
and fallen king, now an old man, broken and 
worn by his sufferings, comes as a suppliant to 
Athens. The wrath of an avenging righteous 
order has been appeased by his grievous woes, and 
the time has come for reconciliation and peace. 
(Edipus has been the cause of frightful evils, and 
he has atoned for them by sufferings worse than 
death. Yet although the source of wrong, he has 
acted in the innocency of his heart; the retribu- 
tions he has endured are out of all proportion to 
his guilt ; the gods are in his debt and must do 
him justice. They do this by giving him double for 
what he has lost. He had been driven from The- 
ban soil ; Creon beseeches him to return. He had 
been deprived of his power ; Fate now gives him 
the authority to determine who shall occupy his 
throne. Polynices, his son, comes pleading his 
father's forgiveness and asking for a blessing 
upon his arms. He is dismissed with an awful 
curse. Theseus, the hero king of Athens, wel- 
comes him with great honor and promises him 
full protection. But supernatural glories await 
the one who has so nobly borne the inflictions 
of divine justice. Jove's thunders peal fearfully 
overhead, and all are awed before this dread per- 
son whom the gods are about signally to honor. 
In one of the finest passages in ancient literature 
the story is told of how (Edipus, to prepare him- 



64 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

self for his translation, washed himself in pure 
water, put on a spotless garment, and, summoned 
by the thunders of Zeus, bade his faithful daugh- 
ters an affectionate farewell. After a brief si- 
lence a voice is heard calling (Edipus to hasten 
his departure. The awe-stricken attendants now 
hurry away, leaving the one about to be glorified 
in the company of the Athenian king. When the 
affrighted followers had sufficiently recovered 
from their superstitious terror to look back, they 
were amazed to see the king standing alone, cov- 
ering his eyes with his hand to shut out a sight 
too glorious for mortal vision to behold. Thus by 
the apotheosis of (Edipus did the gods at last 
adjust the scales. 

With almost preternatural power Sophocles 
has dealt with the problem of sin, retribution, 
and reconciliation. Sin is the transgression of the 
law. It have may been committed unconsciously, 
yet it unlooses the terrible forces of retribution. 
This is not a poet's dream or a pagan superstition. 
No law can be violated with impunity, even though 
the offender acts in ignorance. Ketribution for 
every offense is seen to be swift, sure, overwhelm- 
ing. Reconciliation is treated only in the one 
aspect of expiation. 

Sophocles was a deeply religious man. His 
constant theme is reverence for God. Partly in 
deference to popular superstition, partly for its 
convenience in symbolizing local manifestation of 



SOPHOCLES 65 

the divine power, he made use of polytheism, but 
his religion is essentially monotheistic. There is 
one unchangeable divine order ; one inexorable, 
mysterious, irresistible Will who decrees the fate 
of mortals and sends his sure judgment against 
iniquity. If a man sins, the penalty is upon him 
and upon his children even to the third and fourth 
generation. Through his prophets God foretells 
the doom of the fated house. In vain one seeks 
to avert the impending calamity. No wiles nor 
tricks can turn aside the inevitable decrees. Yet 
they do not fall upon one perfectly righteous. 
Against the throne where justice sits on high 
man stumbles. Some act of pride, some moment 
of self-will, some outburst of impetuous temper 
identifies the victim with the sin of his house, and 
then upon him the avalanche of woe falls. This 
is simply a dramatic interpretation of the laws 
of heredity, or of the will of God. When power- 
fully and concretely visualized it shocks us and 
we think it a pagan view of life, but Sophocles is 
simply describing certain familiar laws which we 
believe are the expression of the will of the Eter- 
nal Righteousness. 

Of the inviolability of the Right, Sophocles 
had no doubt. God — 

" never yet to human wrong 
Left the unbalanc'd scale." 

Penalty is always exacted. It is an eye for an 
eye and a tooth for a tooth. God is not mocked; 



66 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

each must reap his harvest. There is no atone- 
ment, no reconciliation with God, until justice 
has been done. What will satisfy divine justice ? 
What will expiate sin ? The answer we find in 
(Edipus is that it is suffering endured submissively 
until the heart is purified and the will subdued. 
Sufferings thus borne propitiate the moral in- 
dignation both of the gods and man. If (Edi- 
pus had shown no sense of the greatness of his 
offenses and had lived in ease and power, ut- 
terly ignoring them, we can conceive that then 
there would have been an outburst in Thebes 
and from the oracles, which would have brought 
him to a consciousness of his misdeeds. But 
knowing his sin, repenting of it, and suffering 
for it, he expiated it. 

Sophocles does not work out the whole problem 
of reconciliation. The curse does not stop with 
(Edipus, else we should not have had Antigone's 
sufferings in later years. With his confidence 
in heaven's regard, his knowledge that retribu- 
tion will overtake his enemies, his assurance that 
mighty in his grave he will prove a blessing to 
the land which sheltered him, and that evil has 
worked good, (Edipus is partially reconciled to 
his fate. But although our problem is only par- 
tially solved, we have learned enough to feel that 
in our interpretation of the atonement we must 
not slur over those principles of righteousness 
which Sophocles has so powerfully expounded. 



VI 

DANTE 



The Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More 
than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning 1 of a language and 
the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and 
the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monu- 
ments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can reach 
to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on, marking 
out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as 
epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the Iliad 
and Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, 
with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justin's Code, and 
with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem ; 
and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and 
Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date ; it 
accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began. 

Dean Church. 



CHAPTER VI 

DANTE 

The next writer of permanent and command- 
ing fame who can help us in our investigation is 
Dante. That we pass immediately from Athens 
to Florence will doubtless surprise the reader. 
Latin literature would naturally engage our at- 
tention, Rome succeeding Athens as the centre 
of the world's intellectual leadership. But the 
Roman mind sadly lacked in ethical and spiritual 
originality. Executive force, and not the open 
vision into the world of spiritual realities, was the 
glory of the Eternal City. Rome was an un- 
blushing borrower. Greek plays were put upon 
the stage and received with enthusiasm, but in all 
the centuries of Roman dominion there arose no 
dramatist, no poet, no spiritual genius of any 
kind who dealt, even in a second-rate manner, 
with the theme which has been organic in all 
other great literatures. It seems strange that the 
world's most massive civilization rose and crum- 
bled without having a single soul break away 
from the dead level of the national genius, and 
utter a clear and original word on the exist- 
ence and healing of the great discord. Over a 



70 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

monotonous and, for our present purpose, a spir- 
itual desert, we fly until we come to the " poet 
saturnine." 

Sin, Ketribution, Eeconciliation, are preemi- 
nently his theme. Like Homer he represents 
more than himself : he is the voice of a distinct 
epoch of thought. He does not utter his indi- 
vidual conclusions, but sets forth in forms of 
imperishable beauty the subtly analyzed experi- 
ences and the matured convictions of many gen- 
erations. What the Christian world during ten 
centuries had, by earnest battles with formidable 
difficulties, learned the significance of life to be, 
what it sought after with passionate aspirations 
and dreaded wifch superstitious fears, what pro- 
found and clear-visioned men had wrought into 
doctrine, — all this Thomas Aquinas concate- 
nated in his "Summa Theologica" into a minute 
andmarvelously comprehensive system of thought ; 
and this Dante made immortal by the music of 
his verse and the vividness of his pictures. The 
evidential value of the poet's testimony is greater 
than if he gave simply the insights of his genius. 
He speaks for the accumulated experience and 
faith of a thousand years. His voice is the voice 
of many waters. 

It becomes us to beware of a certain modern 
superciliousness toward mediaeval thought as semi- 
barbarous and ignorant. The spiritual needs of 
men do not differ much from age to age. Forms 



DANTE 71 

of expression change, but the generations face the 
same mysteries, bear the same burdens, and feel 
the same hungerings and thirstings. Wisdom in 
things spiritual is not dependent on breadth of 
scientific knowledge, else Moses, Isaiah, and Paul 
would be blind guides. The world has known no 
more astute, profound, and saintly minds than 
those who brought forth the mediaeval concep- 
tion of the relation of God to the soul. We may 
employ different symbols and occupy a different 
point of view, but the truth which gave to their 
characters enduring strength and saintly beauty 
is still vital. 

The mediaeval world is so opposite to our own 
that it is easier to understand the Greek drama- 
tists and even Homer than it is to comprehend 
the great Florentine, yet Dante is not obscure 
in his essential teachings. "Midway upon the 
journey of our life," he tells us in the " Divine 
Comedy," " I found myself within a dark wood, 
for the right way had been missed. Ah ! how 
hard a thing it is to tell what this wild and rough 
and dense wood was, which in thought renews 
the fear ! So bitter is it that death is little more. 
But in order to treat of the good that there I 
found, I will tell of the other things that I have 
seen there. I cannot well recount how I entered 
it, so full was I of slumber at that point where I 
abandoned the true way. But after I had arrived 
at the foot of a hill, where that valley ended 



72 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

which had pierced my heart with fear, I looked 
on high, and saw its shoulders clothed already 
with the rays of the planet that leadeth men 
aright along every path." He essayed to climb 
this sunlit mountain, but three wild beasts sprang 
out upon him, — a she-leopard, a lion, and a she- 
wolf. Dante fought valiantly against them for a 
time, but little by little they pushed him back to 
where "the Sun is silent." " While I was falling 
back to the low place, before mine eyes appeared 
one who through long silence seemed hoarse. 
When I saw him in the great desert, ' Have pity 
on me ! ' I cried to him, ' whatso thou art, or shade 
or real man.' " * It was Virgil who promised to 
lead him in a better way. 

Dante intimates in this beautiful symbolism 
that when he was thirty-five years of age he 
awoke to find that he had missed the way of true 
life. Seeing before him the sunlit mountain of 
virtue, he tried to climb it with no strength save 
his own unaided powers, but the sins of inconti- 
nence, violence, and fraud were too strong for him. 
Then Keason came to reveal the true path to bless- 
edness. The " Divine Comedy " is Dante's inter- 
pretation of the way of life. Reason, symbolized 
by Virgil, shows him in the "Inferno" what is the 
real nature of sin and its dreadful consequences. 
In the "Purgatorio" is disclosed how the stain 

1 All the quotations in this chapter are from Charles Eliot 
Norton's translation of the "Divine Comedy." 



DANTE 73 

of sin is expunged from the soul. Beyond this, 
Reason, even though enlightened by divine grace, 
cannot go, and a new guide, Beatrice, type of 
the Divine Revelation, leads the eager, purified 
soul into the celestial mysteries, until by direct 
vision Dante sees God face to face. 

On no page in literature are the facts of sin 
and retribution and the processes of reconciliation 
more thoroughly considered or more powerfully 
explained than in the "Divine Comedy." 

The " Inferno" is not a description of a prison 
house of torture, but is a descent into human ex- 
perience. It is the poet's declaration of the char- 
acter of sin. Dante seems to have said within 
himself, "Let the theologians wrangle about 
their definitions; their contentions issue in no- 
thing. I will portray sin in colors so lurid and in 
figures so hideous that men will see its true na- 
ture, — see it so vividly that they will turn back 
their feet from the way of death ! " This could 
be done only by painting sin in its ultimate con- 
ditions when it is stripped of all blandishments 
and has brought forth its full fruition. The " In- 
ferno," therefore, is to be read as Dante's con- 
ception of sin and retribution. He employs three 
distinct ways of enforcing his thought. 

Sin is symbolized in the repulsive monsters pre- 
siding over the concentric circles. In them sin 
is declared to be vulgar, brutal, grotesque. 

The environment also suggests the nature of 



74 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the evil there requited. The in continent are 
punished in a zone of darkness, for this sin ex- 
tinguishes the light of the mind. The violent in 
a zone of fire learn that God is a consuming 
flame against the rebellious. The lowest pit is a 
zone of arctic cold, for the soul is in its deepest 
hell when its sympathies are congealed, its sensi- 
bilities are extinct, and the whole nature dead in 
sin. 

The method of punishment discloses even more 
elaborately Dante's thought. The lustful are 
swept about on a never-resting storm ; hypocrites 
wear a leaden cloak that looks like gold; flat- 
terers wallow in filth. 

But it is in the person and condition of Luci- 
fer that the poet most powerfully delineates his 
vision of sin. At the bottom of the pit, and 
therefore at the point farthest removed from 
God, is his prison house. Huge, bloody, loath- 
some, grotesque, self-absorbed ; not dead nor 
yet alive ; having three faces, one fiery red, one 
between white and yellow, one black, — indicat- 
ing the threefold character of sin as malignant, 
impotent, and ignorant, — every moment send- 
ing forth chilling death, making others woeful 
in his own woes, punishing his followers with 
frightful torture, and undoing himself; the 
tears of the world flowing back to him as their 
source and becoming his torment; the movement 
of his wings, by which he seeks to extricate him- 



DANTE 75 

self, freezing the rivers of tears and blood and 
thus imprisoning him, — what more fitting per- 
sonification could this seer have devised to show 
evil in its real deformity and folly ? The unsightly 
and self-centred Lucifer is perhaps the truest 
characterization of sin in literature. 

The retributions of wrong-doing are sure and 
terrible. The real penalty of sin is not so much 
what happens to a man as what takes place within 
him. The sinner's emotions and deeds fashion 
the character in which we must live. There is no 
evading the reprisals of wrong-doing. Instantly 
the effect is registered upon the soul of the per- 
petrator. 

The feature which most impressed Dante, as 
it did Homer, was the blindness with which the 
sinner was smitten. As they entered the dread- 
ful portal of the lower world, Virgil said to his 
companion : "We have come to the place where 
I have told thee that thou shalt see the woeful 
people, who have lost the good of the under- 
standing." In the poet's philosophy the summum 
bonum is to see God's power in nature, and his 
justice and love in individual and national life; 
to behold only unconscious force in nature, and 
pitiless fate and capricious chance in human 
affairs, is the earth's Inferno. This penal blind- 
ness, which by unwearied law the Most High 
dispenses to lawless desires, is sin's most dreadful 
consequence. 



76 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Dante agrees with the other authors whom we 
have studied, that we come to a knowledge of 
sin by the shock of its results, only he does not 
trace it in the curse smiting a family, or in a 
plague devastating a city, but in the blindness, 
torture, and sterility of the sinner's own soul. 

The problem of Keconciliation Dante works 
out in the " Purgatorio " in a way most impressive. 
Although, contrary to the common impression, he 
centres his theology in the love of God, believing 
that the unspeakable glory of that love, flashing 
down through the various spheres, penetrates all 
things ; yet as the divinely appointed prophet of 
the exactitude and majesty of the moral law, he 
asserts that before the soul can be freed from 
the bondage of sin there are certain inexorable, 
judicial requirements which must be met. He 
accepted the prevalent notion of his time that 
Christ's death on the cross was a satisfaction to 
divine justice, remitting the eternal penalties of 
sin to all who by baptism and repentance iden- 
tified themselves with the Son of God. What 
man must do to complete the reconciliation he 
shows most vividly and minutely as he makes the 
ascent of the Purgatorial mountain. This teach- 
ing is epitomized in a single picture of great 
power and suggestiveness : Following Virgil he 
moves to a cliff which rises sheer before him, 
where in a rift, he says, " I saw a gate, and three 
steps beneath for going to it of divers colors, and 



DANTE 77 

a gate-keeper who as yet said not a word. . . . 
Thither we came to the first great stair ; it was 
of white marble so polished and smooth that I 
mirrored myself in it as I appear. The second, 
of deeper hue than perse, was of a rough and 
scorched stone, cracked lengthwise and athwart. 
The third, which above lies massy, seemed to me 
of porphyry as flaming red as blood that spirts 
forth from a vein. Upon this the Angel of God 
held both his feet, sitting upon the threshold that 
seemed to me stone of adamant. Up over the 
three steps my Leader drew me with good will, 
saying, 'Beg humbly that he undo the lock.' 
Devoutly I threw myself at the holy feet ; I be- 
sought for mercy's sake that he would open for 
me ; but first upon my breast I struck three times. 
Seven P 's upon my forehead he inscribed with 
the point of his sword, and ' See that thou wash 
these wounds when thou art within,' he said." * 
The gate symbolizes justification. Ere a man 
can be justified before God he must know his 
sin, seeing himself mirrored exactly as he is ; 
he must repent of it, and render full satisfac- 
tion for it. There are three steps, confession, 
contrition, satisfaction, declared by the Catholic 
Church to be necessary for justification. Confes- 
sion is not mere verbal acknowledgment. It is 
a self-mirroring, so that the soul stands before 
itself and the world in its true light. Contrition 

1 Purgatorio, ix, 94-114. 



78 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

must be absolute and sincere, and the satisfac- 
tion rendered to God is the work of Christ, sup- 
plemented by the sinner's own expiatory deeds. 
The seven P's — Peccata — signify the seven 
mortal sins which must be purged away before 
the stained soul is pure in the sight of God. 
Passing through the gate of justification, Dante 
traversed the seven ledges of the Holy Moun- 
tain. Upon each he learns how the scum of one 
of the seven mortal sins is dissolved from off 
the conscience, and the primitive lustre is re- 
stored. The penitent spirits are taught fully to 
understand the nature of their sin and of the 
contrary virtue, and are persuaded to practice 
that virtue so as both to satisfy divine justice 
and to heal the wounds sin has made in the soul. 
When confession, contrition, and satisfaction ef- 
fect their perfect work all vestiges of sin are ob- 
literated from the chastened spirit. He is now at 
the top of the mountain, and has reached the 
moral condition of the first man. This is indicated 
by Virgil's triumphant words : " Free, upright, 
and sound is thine own will, and it would be 
wrong not to act according to its choice; where- 
fore thee over thyself I crown and mitre." 1 

There is one phase of reconciliation which we 
meet with for the first time. It was hinted at 
by Sophocles when (Edipus, the moment after he 
has torn out his eyes, exclaims : — 

1 Purgatorio, xxvii, 140-142. 



DANTE 79 

a More painful is the memory of my crimes 
Than all the wounds my wild distractions made." 

The thought is not taken up again, and we can 
only surmise that the painful memory was healed 
by the balm of time and the consciousness of 
the power and blessedness which were to be his 
through the special honor of Zeus. But Dante 
soberly faces the problem of an atonement for 
the memory. There is no perfect reconciliation 
unless one is reconciled to his past. He cannot 
carry a memory ashamed and embittered into 
the bliss of the next world. It would be a dark 
spot amid supernal glory, a drop of poison in the 
cup of life, a discord amid celestial harmonies. 
It is not enough for God to forgive the sinner ; 
the contrite one must so view his past that he 
can forgive himself. In one of the most beau- 
tiful passages in literature Dante describes this 
experience. 1 The seven P's had been cleansed 
from his forehead, and the stains of the seven 
mortal sins from his soul. He had met Beatrice 
and confessed his unfaithfulness, yet he cannot 
enter celestial joys with a befouled memory. 
Then it was that Matilda, type of a life of vir- 
tuous activity, " drew me into the stream up to 
the throat, and dragging me after her was moving 
over the water light as a shuttle. When I was 
near the blessed shore, I heard c Asperges me ' so 
sweetly that I cannot remember it, far less write 

1 Purgatorio, xxxi. 



80 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

it. The beautiful lady opened her arms, clasped 
my head, and plunged me in where I had perforce 
to swallow of the water." In the dark waters 
of Lethe, which flows out of the fountain of the 
grace of God, all memory of sin vanished to 
trouble him no more. 

One should hesitate long before criticising a 
great experience so beautifully delineated, yet a 
Lethe which thoroughly washed away all the foul 
blots from our memories and left merely the re- 
collection of the good would deprive us of a large 
part of our richest heritage. Only a mangled, 
half -instructed creature would remain. We need 
the background of our whole past if we are to 
understand its significance and wisely meet the 
future. Moreover, a life of virtuous activity can- 
not so immerse us in a stream of events that an 
evil past will cease to trouble us. Dante's vision, 
at the close of the " Paradiso," of all things held 
in the light and love of God, furnishes a better 
solution of the problem of a blackened memory 
than his Lethe. A disagreeable past is more sat- 
isfactorily disposed of when it is seen immersed 
in the Lake of Sempiternal Light, than when al- 
lowed to float down the dark stream of forget- 
fulness. 

One further experience the poet passes through 
in his reconciliation with his past. Following his 
gentle guide, he enters the river Eunoe, a creation 
of his own imagination, whose draught was so 



DANTE 81 

sweet that it could never have sated him. Thus 
does he symbolize that there is an energy work- 
ing in a redeemed spirit which recreates it, and 
gives it complete victory over the effects of sin. 

While the " Purgatorio " teaches that confes- 
sion, contrition, and satisfaction, which heal the 
hurts of sin and restore our nature to its original 
freedom, are the first steps in religion, the meth- 
ods by which the full joy of reconciliation are 
reached are described in the "Paradiso." Fixing 
his eyes upon Beatrice — symbol of the Revealed 
Truth of God — with that look of faith which 
is the soul's intuitive and final abandonment of 
itself to another, Dante ascends from star to star, 
from virtue to virtue, until, perfected in character, 
he is capable of enjoying the ultimate blessedness. 
Led on by St. Bernard, the exponent of mystic 
faith, he approaches the Fountain of Living 
Light Eternal. With anointed eyes he looks. 

" My sight, becoming pure, was entering more 
and more through the radiance of the lofty Light 
which of itself is true. I saw that in its depths is 
enclosed, bound up with love in one volume, that 
which is dispersed in leaves through the universe ; 
substance and accidents and their modes fused 
together, as it were, in such wise that that of 
which I speak is one simple Light. In that Light 
one becomes such that it is impossible he should 
ever consent to turn himself from it for other 
sight ; because the Good which is the object of 



82 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the will is all collected in it, and outside of it that 
is defective which is perfect there. Within the 
profound and clear subsistence of the lofty Light 
appeared to me three circles of three colors and 
of one dimension ; and one seemed reflected by 
the other, as Iris by Iris, and the third seemed 
fire which from the one and from the other is 
equally breathed forth. That circle, which ap- 
peared in Thee generated as a reflected light, 
being awhile surveyed by my eyes, seemed to me 
depicted with our effigy within itself, of its own 
very color, wherefore my sight was wholly set 
upon it. As is the geometer who wholly applies 
himself to measure the circle, and finds not by 
thinking that principle of which he is in need, 
such was I at that new sight. I wished to see 
how the image was conformed to the circle, and 
how it has its place therein ; but my own wings 
were not for this, had it not been that my mind 
was smitten by a flash in which its wish came. 

" To my high fantasy here power failed ; but 
now my desire and my will were revolved, like a 
wheel which is moved evenly, by the Love which 
moves the sun and other stars." 1 

To see God in all things and all things in God, 
bound in one volume of love, and to know that 
God is in humanity and that our humanity is 
rooted and grounded in him, — this is life eter- 
nal ; this is perfect reconciliation. 

1 Paradiso, xxxiii. 



DANTE 83 

In reflecting upon the principles which Dante 
— or rather the Middle Ages speaking through 
him — considered essential to reconciliation, it is 
extremely interesting to note that every princi- 
ple recognized by the authors we have studied is 
distinctly stated by him, while some which they 
dimly apprehended he clearly enunciates. With 
Homer, iEschylus, Sophocles, he emphasizes the 
defilement of sin, only he paints it more minutely 
and powerfully. What in Homer is a mere cere- 
monial pollution in Dante is distortion of soul. 
This is his constant thought in every circle of 
Hell, and on every ledge of Purgatory. Even by 
looking upon sin in his descent through the gulf 
of the infernal regions there is grime on his face 
which Virgil washes off with the dew. With 
Sophocles, he points out the necessity of the sin- 
ner seeing himself mirrored as he is, and the 
need of being truly contrite. 

His reverence for the sanctity and integrity of 
the moral universe is as exalted as theirs. The 
blood-red step of satisfaction is with him, as with 
them, the final and inevitable step. No writer 
of ancient or modern times puts more insistent 
emphasis on a full settlement with righteousness 
than this stern prophet of the justice of God. 
Sin is so destructive that it works havoc in a 
delicately adjusted moral system. " And to his 
dignity he [man] never returns, unless, where sin 
makes void, he fill up for evil pleasures with just 



84 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

penalties." * Although the arms of divine mercy 
are so wide extended, still God cannot receive 
the sinner to himself until the void has been 
filled. Christ, who is, like Orestes, the repre- 
sentative of both parties, by his death offers a 
satisfaction. He might have paid all the debt, 
but he lets man have some part in the work by 
enjoining upon him the expiation of all the tem- 
poral penalties of sin. How these sins are expiated 
is one of the prominent features of the " Purgato- 
rio," and the necessity for rendering such satis- 
faction is constantly reiterated. On the ledge of 
Pride this is stated repeatedly : " And here must 
I bear this load for it till God be satisfied," "of 
such pride the fee is here paid," "such coin does 
every one pay in satisfaction." 2 The avaricious 
lie prostrate ; " so long as it shall be the pleasure 
of the just Lord, so long shall we stay immova- 
ble and outstretched." 3 The gluttonous "go 
loosing the knot of their debt." 4 The lustful 
are in the flames because " with such cure it is 
needful, and with such diet, that the last wound 
of all should be closed up." 5 The expiatory pen- 
alties, however, are not vindictive or arbitrary, 
but are adjusted to the purification of the soul. 
They are both a satisfaction rendered to a vio- 
lated moral order, and are remedial to the peni- 

1 Paradiso, vii, 82. 2 Purgatorio, xi, 70, 71, 88, 125. 

3 Purgatorio, xix, 125, 126. 4 Purgatorio, xxiii, 15. 
5 Purgatorio, xxv, 138, 139. 



DANTE 85 

tent by confirming him in right habits of thought 
and action. 

The void made by sin must be filled; com- 
plete reparation must be made ; God must be 
just in the act of forgiveness ; else the pillared 
firmament is rottenness, and earth's base built 
on stubble, — to this conviction Dante yielded 
no half-hearted assent. 

His original contribution to our study is 
the clear recognition of what Sophocles dimly 
beheld, viz,, that man must be reconciled to his 
past. How this is done he partially answers in 
his symbol of Lethe, indicating that virtuous 
activity changes our relation to the past, making 
it an alien and forgotten thing, and at the same 
time, as the river Eunoe suggests, healing the 
wounds and overcoming the weaknesses caused 
by sin. The final and complete answer is in the 
ultimate vision, when he sees all things perfect 
in God, bound together in the one volume of his 
love. The guiltiest soul can look upon his record 
and still join in the full joys of redemption when 
through all his experiences he sees the glory of 
God's perfect justice and love. 

Sophocles could not fully answer this ques- 
tion of peace for a tormenting memory, or depict 
an unshadowed reconciliation, because his un- 
anointed eyes had not caught sight of the glory 
of the Christian revelation that in infinite love 
all things consist and in that love they shall finally 



86 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

be known. Therefore the apotheosis of (Edipus 
was his nearest approach. He recognized Dante's 
problem, and groped for the same answer, but he 
saw through a glass darkly. 

Dante also adds to our thought something 
which is only faintly glimpsed in the authors we 
have considered, but which becomes more con- 
spicuous in later writers. Men of to-day are not 
greatly concerned to secure pardon before a hy- 
pothetical judgment-seat of God ; but they have 
many a bitter struggle to acquiesce in the provi- 
dential order of the world, and the discipline 
God inflicts upon them. This new and impor- 
tant phase of reconciliation Dante recognizes 
and solves. He affirms that even though a man 
experiences the drenching gloom of hell, and 
feels the sting of purgatorial discipline, yet 
if his habitual moods are those of faith, hope, 
and love he will attain such a firm conviction of 
the Goodness penetrating all things that he will 
be joined to God in a rapturous reconciliation. 
He is able joyfully to accept life and all that it 
brings of weal or woe, so unshaken is his certi- 
tude of the Divine Compassion. 



VII 

SHAKESPEARE 



Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the one opinion one sometimes 
hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one ; I think 
the hest judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, 
is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakespeare is the chief of 
all poets hitherto ; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, 
has left record of himself in way of literature. On the whole, I know 
not such a power of vision, such faculty of thought, if we take all the 
characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth ; placid 
joyous strength ; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true 
and clear, as in a tranquil and unfathomable sea ! — Thomas Carlyle. 



CHAPTER VII 

SHAKESPEAKE 

The next mind to arrest our attention be- 
cause of its depth of insight into the woes and 
victories of life is that of Shakespeare. His 
point of view is very different from Dante's. 
While Shakespeare is "world-wide" in his sym- 
pathies, he very clearly stands with the group 
of healthy, robust, thoroughly mundane poets 
of the Elizabethan era in his outlook upon hu- 
manity. It was a lusty, vigorous age, in which 
things temporal loomed large and seemed emi- 
nently worth while. Dante saw life sub specie 
aeternitatis. Shakespeare beheld the eternal 
only as it revealed itself under the conditions 
of time. Yet his was too deep a mind not to 
feel the encompassing, ever-present mystery into 
which all that is plain shades off. His emotions 
in the presence of the Unknown were those of 
Goethe, which Carlyle has so beautifully ex- 
pressed : — 

" Stars silent rest o'er us, 
Graves under us silent, 
And while earnest thou gazest 
Comes boding of terror, 
Comes phantasm and error 



90 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Perplexing the bravest 
With doubt and misgiving. 
But heard are the voices, 
Heard are the sages, 
The World and the Ages. 
Choose well, your choice is 
Brief but yet endless." 

The positive religious note which Shakespeare 
strikes is the same as that which vibrated so 
powerfully in the Greek tragedies. The English- 
man is even more impressive than they in the 
titanic energy with which he utters his judgment 
of sin and its entail of woe. His theology seems 
to resolve itself into the clear recognition of 
a Universal Law, inexorable, divinely ordained, 
manifested in the minutest actions of life and in 
the vast upheavals of society. In this closely 
woven, all-penetrating network of moral forces 
man has his being. He is free to do the one act 
which, once performed, involves him in the toils 
of the inevitable reaction. The recoil may be 
a just recompense for evil, as in the case of 
Macbeth, or it may pile up vicarious suffering for 
the innocent, as in the sorrows of Juliet. It is in 
this austere conception of a moral equilibrium 
disturbed by willful sin and foolish passion that 
Shakespeare's religious sentiments most power- 
fully disclose themselves. 

Shakespeare's graphic portrayals of sin and its 
nemesis are so familiar that we shall not linger 
over them. Macbeth has his moment of freedom ; 



SHAKESPEARE 91 

then, yielding to temptation, he is caught in the 
grip of Necessity, tormented by horror within 
and disorders without, until he dies a forsaken 
wretch in a losing battle. His " fiend-like queen " 
suffered similar torments, and " by self and violent 
hands took off her life." 

In Kichard III every movement of the play is 
the development of some phase of retribution. 
In that terrible scene * when Queen Margaret 
curses the various Yorkist conspirators, the spec- 
tator is made to feel that the woes about to light 
on the reigning house are punishments for crimes 
against the house of Lancaster, while Richard 
intimates that the wounds of Lancaster are re- 
quitals for deeds done to the house of York. 

For Richard's heinous sins simple death on 
the battlefield, or by the hand of an assassin, is 
not penalty enough. His crimes have been too 
atrocious and multiplied. He is not only the tool 
of Providence working compensation upon others 
commensurate with their guilt ; his preeminence 
in evil singles him out for conspicuous retribu- 
tion. What this is to be Margaret foretells : — 

" The worm of conscience still be-gnaw thy soul ! 
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv'st, 
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends ! 
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine, 
Unless it be while some tormenting dream 
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils ! 
Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog ! " 2 

1 Richard 111, Act I, sc. iii. 2 Act I, sc. iii. 



92 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

This was fulfilled in the famous night scene, 
when, with his imperious will helpless in sleep, 
the frenzy of remorse holds its high carnival in 
his soul. 

To cite additional instances proving that Shake- 
speare believed as firmly as did Dante, Sophocles, 
or iEschylus in the moral framework of the 
world, is certainly unnecessary. 

In unraveling the net of evil and revealing the 
final reconciliation, the English dramatist gives us 
valuable help. The mind of the spectator, pained, 
thrilled, awed by the experiences passed through, 
must find rest at last in what is at least a partial 
satisfaction. Sometimes the victim triumphs over 
his foes and receives visible compensation for his 
losses, as when Prospero held his enemies in his 
power, forgave them, and received back his duke- 
dom. But life usually offers no such easy solution. 
Evil is not fully punished, nor virtue rewarded, in 
our actual experience. Some hurts are too deep 
to be healed by any temporal prosperity. Satis- 
factions deeper than any worldly dignities can give 
are needed. To meet this demand for the Eternal 
to explain and readjust the entanglements of time, 
dramatists have had recourse to the great Recon- 
ciler, Death. Upon the stormy stage where pas- 
sions have clashed and sin has displayed its dread- 
ful hideousness, where guilt and innocence, 
blindness, folly, malignity, have struggled in 
feverish intensity, comes at last the repose and 



SHAKESPEARE 93 

unconquerable peace of death. So often is death 
employed as the denouement of tragedy, that 
tragedy and death have become synonymous. For 
the guilty soul, death with its awful mystery, 
its suggestion of a judgment to come where per- 
fect equity will be meted out to all, affords not 
only a necessary artistic ending of the drama, but 
satisfies our instincts for justice. So Agamem- 
non, Jocasta, Macbeth, all expiate their crimes. 
The innocent victim caught in the coil of evil 
finally passes to "where beyond these voices 
there is peace.'' 

" Duncan is in his grave : 
After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well." 

The stately repose compensates for the fever. 
In the death of the innocent there is always a 
suggestion of eternal peace, of being beyond the 
raving and malice of foes, an intimation of a 
final vindication that reconciles the spectator to 
the fate of the guiltless victim. Often the dra- 
matic artist feels that he must make it clear that 
death ushers in the final compensation, as when 
Sophocles surrounds the death of (Edipus with 
supernatural portents, or when Shakespeare 
makes Horatio exclaim over the dead Hamlet : 

" Good-night, sweet prince, 
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest ! " 

or when Goethe represents a voice from heaven 
crying at Margaret's death, " Is saved." 

But Shakespeare's mind could not permanently 



94 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

be satisfied with such a conception of life as is 
revealed in the tragedies. Neither could he push 
the solution of life's dissonance over into the 
mysteries of that future existence of which death 
is the portal. He was too intensely human, too 
thoroughly interested in the life that now is, to 
lay great stress upon a possible adjustment be- 
yond the veil. What forces of reconciliation are 
now active, making life endurable and of rich 
significance ? A mind like his was too sane and 
had too much of rational joy in it to be content 
with such a picture of life as he had drawn in 
his darker moods, — Iago sitting cool and malig- 
nant, with Othello and Desdemona dead ; Ophe- 
lia a suicide and Hamlet a corpse through an- 
other's sin ; Cordelia's sweet spirit extinguished 
by a villain's hasty order, and Lear's choleric 
temper spreading a horrible devastation. Is evil 
supreme? Must men perish in their blindness? 
Is there no redeeming energy in the world that 
opens the eyes of the blind, breaks the hideous 
power of sin, and brings peace and wisdom out 
of discord ? Shakespeare in his later plays seems 
to have sought a reconciliation with the world 
for his own soul's good, so that in these we find 
the interest centred in the study of the forces 
which knit up the raveled sleeve of life. 

In 1610 he retired from the theatre and went 
to live in Stratford. In 1611, as nearly as the 
date can be fixed, we have two plays from his 



SHAKESPEARE 95 

pen, "The Winter's Tale " and " The Tempest," 
both of them revealing the ways in which life's 
wounds are healed. 

In "The Winter's Tale," Leontes, in a passion 
of inordinate and senseless jealousy, accuses his 
noble queen of infidelity. His frenzy is as over- 
whelming as that of Othello, but in this play it 
is met by a fortitude which Desdemona did not 
possess. Hermione girds herself for the ordeal : 

" There 's some ill planet reigiis ; 
I must be patient till the heavens look 
With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords, 
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew 
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have 
That honourable grief lodged here, which burns 
Worse than tears drown." 1 

She believes that her innocence will be established, 
and that her sufferings will work repentance in 
her husband's heart : — 

" How this will grieve you, 
When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that 
You have thus publish'd me ! " 1 

Yet sin is no such light thing that confession 
can atone for it : — 

" Gentle my lord, 
You scarce can right me thoroughly then, to say 
You did mistake." 1 

When Leontes' sin bears fruit in the supposed 
death of Hermione and the death of his son, he 
immediately repents, and sets about repairing the 

1 Act I. sc. i. 



96 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

damage of his fault. This, Paulina reminds him, 
is no easy task : — 

" But, O thou tyrant ! 
Do not repent these things ; for they are heavier 
Than all thy woes can stir ; therefore betake thee 
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees 
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, 
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter 
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods 
To look that way thou wert." x 

For sixteen years Leontes sought by prayer and 
good deeds to expiate his sin. Sorrow and re- 
morse purge the evil from his nature, until the 
good queen, who has been in hiding while this 
cleansing, upbuilding process was going on, re- 
veals herself, and in her silent embrace forgives 
the wretched past. The play further discloses 
how out of evil good comes, not only to the chas- 
tened nature of the king, but to his discarded 
daughter, Perdita. The teaching is clear that the 
evil-doer may be brought to repentance by patient 
goodness, cleansed by sorrow, and finally forgiven. 
In " The Tempest " we have a more perfect 
development of the same theme. This is probably 
the last complete play the great dramatist wrote. 
He holds his wondrous Ariel for a few hours till 
his task is done, and then he sets him at liberty. 

" I '11 break my staff, 
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, 
And deeper than did ever plummet sound, 
I '11 drown my book." 2 

1 Act III, sc. ii. 2 Act V, sc. i. 



SHAKESPEARE 97 

The poet's own final feeling toward life and 
its meaning is revealed in the mellow, kindly 
light which rests upon the whole scene. The play 
expresses also his mature convictions. In order 
that in the space of a few hours he may epito- 
mize life, its constituent forces and ultimate issue, 
Shakespeare has recourse to enchantment ; this 
gives the will of his hero unhindered sway, and 
enables him to mould all things to his pur- 
pose. 

"The Tempest" mirrors not only Shakespeare's 
mind as he bids farewell to the stage ; it also, as 
a necessary result, gives us his ideal character. If 
Henry V is the poet's ideal man of the world, 
Prospero is unquestionably his moral hero. Sane, 
efficient, irreproachable in moral elevation, yet 
having tenderest sympathies, he represents man 
at his best estate, the man our supreme poet him- 
self would be. 

But the conditions of the play carry us still 
further. Prospero on his enchanted island is 
omnipotent ; all spirits and forces obey his will. 
He is in his domain what the Everlasting is amid 
his worlds. In delineating how an ideal man 
would behave toward his enemies Shakespeare 
has given us a clear glimpse of his conception 
of the character of the Divinity that shapes our 
ends. For our study, therefore, " The Tempest" 
is invaluable. It gives us Shakespeare's idea of 
an overruling Providence in its relation to sin, 



98 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

and makes known the ground of his own recon- 
ciliation with life. 

Let us briefly survey the plot of the story. 
Prospero, Duke of Milan, and his three-year-old 
daughter, Miranda, are put to sea in a rotten 
boat by his usurping brother Antonio with the 
connivance of Alonzo, King of Naples. The scene 
opens twelve years after the crime, with Prospero 
and Miranda on an enchanted island. Prospero 
through his great knowledge is master of the 
spirits, both good and evil, and controls all the 
energies of nature. The King of Naples and the 
usurping duke, with the Prince Ferdinand, are on 
the sea, returning from the wedding of the king's 
daughter. Through Ariel, the Enchanter raises 
a frightful storm on the deep. The company is 
washed into the sea, and the prince separated 
from his father, each thinking the other lost. 
Prospero, as overruling Providence, punished the 
King of Naples for his sin by remorse, even as 
God had punished Richard III : — 

" O, it is monstrous ! monstrous ! 
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it ; 
The winds did sing it to me ; and the thunder, 
That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounced 
The name of Prosper." x 

Antonio, Sebastian, and Caliban are given 
opportunity to reveal their evil natures, but are 
foiled from frustrating the designs of Prospero, 
— for man deviseth in his heart, but God directs 

1 Act III, sc. ill. 



SHAKESPEARE 99 

his steps. When Prospero's enemies are all "knit 
up in their distractions," and are in the gloom 
where tragedy lets fall the final curtain, the real 
nature of the power which inflicts the seeming evil 
is made known. There has been sin and retribu- 
tion, there is also reconciliation. Prospero ex- 
claims : — 

" Though with their high wrongs I am strook to the quick, 
Yet, with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury 
Do I take part. The rarer action is 
In virtue than in vengeance ; they being penitent, 
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend 
Not a frown further." * 

When his clemency is revealed Alonzo, the king, 
is melted to repentance and confession. He also 
restores the dukedom. Antonio is forgiven, but 
there is no genuine reconciliation between the two 
brothers, for there is no contrition on the part of 
the usurper. Even Caliban learns his lesson. 

"I'll be wise hereafter, 
And seek for grace." 

The whole drift of the plot is an expansion of 
the fine statement of Henry V : " There is some 
soul of goodness in things evil." This " soul of 
goodness" rules even at the centre of the uni- 
verse, evil is so constrained as to issue in final 
good, men are guided by a supreme Good Will 
which punishes, but also works benignantly for 
reconciliation. Surrounded by the mystery, inex- 
plicable because of our partial vision, — 

1 Act V, sc. i. 
LOFC. 



100 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

" Do not infest your mind by beating on 
The strangeness of this business." 1 

In time we shall know the whole, — 

" Till then, be cheerful, 
And think of each thing well." 2 

In, the characters of Hermione and Prospero we 
have a deeper note than is struck in the tragedies. 
Sin is permitted to do its worst, but it has met a 
supreme power. The " soul of goodness," in hu- 
manity and in the universe, patiently endures 
all that evil can do, and by steady and effluent 
good will disarms evil, and brings it to repentance 
and final reconciliation. 

Once again the master hand touches this 
great theme of reconciliation with life. In 1613 
Shakespeare with Fletcher perfected Henry VIII 
for the stage. The interest centres in the calam- 
ities falling upon Katharine and Wolsey. The 
queen is a disinterested, high-souled woman, 
and even Wolsey, despite his chicaneries, is at 
heart a true man. Here again the blind wrath 
of man dashes against goodness, but there is no 
tragedy. The queen, deprived of her station, dis- 
plays a moral grandeur which shames the malig- 
nity of her enemies. The reader feels that the 
real victory is with her. She has triumphed over 
evil, and wrong has unwittingly worked righteous- 
ness. And even Wolsey, though he has ventured 
too wantonly on the sea of glory, can be reconciled 

1 Act V, sc. ii. 2 Act V, sc. i. 



SHAKESPEARE 101 

to his fate. His troubles have exalted him above 
their power to hurt. 

" Never so truly happy, my good Cromwell. 
I know myself now ; and I feel within me 
A peace above all earthly dignities, 
A still and quiet conscience." x 

In considering the light which the genius of 
Shakespeare has thrown upon our subject, we 
find that he emphasizes as persistently and as 
unmistakably as iEschylus, Sophocles, or Dante 
the supremacy of a moral order and its sure 
recoil when the equilibrium is disturbed. With 
Dante he recognizes the necessity of repentance 
and confession and the impulse of a contrite soul 
to expiate, so far as possible, the wrong done. 
With Dante he also affirms the supremacy of 
goodness over evil. Goodness meets evil, suffers 
its rage, bears patiently with it, and wins it to 
repentance. This triumph of goodness in our own 
lives reconciles us to the severe process by which 
it was achieved, while our trust that the dark 
forces of nature and society are controlled by an 
Infinite mercy, and eventuate in a good end, is 
the ground of our reconcilement with life. 

We ask the reader's especial attention to the 
consideration which follows. In the closing scene 
of " The Tempest " Prospero says to Alonzo : — 

" Let us not burden our rememberance with 
A heaviness that 's gone." 2 

1 Act III, sc. ii. 



102 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

The past may well be forgotten in the joy of 
the final issue. But if the result had been other- 
wise, and any disaster had ensued, then an un- 
tormented memory would have been impossible. 
Prospero, Alonzo, Wolsey, Katharine, all can 
look back with unembittered recollection upon a 
shadowed and stormy past, because of its felici- 
tous termination. Their eyes were opened to the 
soul of goodness in things evil, goodness had 
triumphed over evil and subdued it, making it 
subserve righteous ends. Prospero can enter into 
unrestrained friendship with his former enemies 
because his good will has prevailed and turned 
tragedy into success. If the tragic forces had 
won, if Miranda had been dishonored by Cali- 
ban, and Antonio had ruled insolently in Milan, 
while Prospero was foiled and defeated, then the 
Enchanter would not have been reconciled with- 
out doing violence to his better nature. He could 
forgive freely and righteously, if his foes recog- 
nized the true nature of their crimes, were gen- 
uinely contrite, and brought forth fruit meet for 
repentance. But the more difficult task of re- 
conciliation is accomplished only when goodness 
has wrought its perfect work. This triumph of 
goodness makes possible Prospero's acquiescence 
in his past, gives peace to his memory, and re- 
conciles him to the severe trials of his life. In 
his vision of the transcendency of the divine 
Power, the supreme Wisdom, and the primal 



SHAKESPEARE 103 

Love, Dante found peace for his tempestuous 
spirit. In the supernatural honors paid to CEdi- 
pus, Sophocles hints that the joy of the con- 
summation would remove all heaviness from the 
burdened mind of his hero. The atonement for 
the memory, the Lethe in which the past is for- 
gotten, is the apprehension by faith of that vic- 
torious goodness which works through faults, 
mistakes, sins, to a glorious result. This alone 
makes possible a reconciliation with one's past. 






VIII 

MILTON 



When I consider how my light is spent 

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, 
And that one talent which is death to hide, 
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent 

To serve therewith my Maker, and present 
My true account, lest he returning chide ; 

" Doth God exact day labour, light denied ? " 
I fondly ask : but Patience, to prevent 

That murmur, soon replies, " God doth not need 
Either man's work, or his own gifts ; who best 
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best : his state 

Is kingly ; thousands at his bidding speed, 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest 
They also serve who only stand and wait." 

John Milton. 



CHAPTER VIII 

MILTON 

Milton's " great organ note of song " grows 
deep and majestic as it pours forth the story — 

" Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us and regain the blissful seat." 

His theme in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise 
Regained " is the one with which we have grown 
so familiar, — Sin, Retribution, Reconciliation. 
His treatment of sin is very different from that 
of either Dante or Shakespeare. Dante portrays 
iniquity in its final estate, a hideous, disgusting, 
loathsome thing whose fit symbol is the mon- 
strous, bloody, half-dead brute, Lucifer. Shake- 
speare represents sin as it is to-day in bad men, 
cunning, malignant, reptilian, finding in Iago its 
fit expression. Milton, however, shows us sin at 
its beginning, when it is fascinating with a lustre 
and glory which it does not have in the end. His 
Satan is of necessity a nobler person than Dante's 
Lucifer. Yet Milton gives prophetic glimpses of 
what the ultimate issue will be. In the beginning 



108 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

of " Paradise Lost " Satan appears as a majestic 
being, titanic in force, possessing stili some of 
his original splendor, like the sun seen through 
the misty air. He is an archangel ruined, and, 
full of primal energy, is capable of putting to 
proof the high supremacy of heaven's perpetual 
King. Suddenly out of the infernal deep Pan- 
demonium arises ; seated on his throne of royal 
state Satan unfolds to his peers in words of lofty 
eloquence his vast plans of rebellion. Passing 
beyond the gates of Sin and Death, he works his 
grievous way through chaos till he comes in sight 
of Eden. Here he falls into many doubts, but, 
unwilling to submit to the will of God, he con- 
firms himself in evil. As craft and serpentine 
deceit take the place of open war, the deeper sin 
brings the deeper ruin to his nature. Returning 
to his followers, he ascends the throne from which 
but a short time before he had spoken such heroic 
words. Refulgent with permissive glory he begins 
to recount his exploits; but, pausing to receive 
the expected applause of the Stygian throng, he is 
amazed to hear — 

" from innumerable tongues, 
A dismal universal hiss." 1 

Not long did he wonder ; his face began to draw 
sharp and spare, his arms clung to his ribs, his 
legs entwined each other, and his noble eloquence 
changed into a hiss ! 

1 Paradise Lost, x, 507. 



MILTON 109 

" Down he fell 
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone, 
Reluctant, but in vain : a greater power 
Now rul'd him, punish'd in the shape he sinn'd, 
According to his doom ; he would have spoke, 
But hiss to hiss returned with forked tongue 
To forked tongue, for now were all transformed 
Alike to serpents all." 1 

Sin begins in pride, grows cunning, treacherous, 
serpentine, and ultimates in a perverted mind 
which cannot distinguish reality from illusion, and 
what seems fair fruit turns to bitter ashes in the 
mouth. After the hellish crew had been turned 
to serpents, there sprang up a grove hard by, — 

" laden with fair fruit, like that 
Which grew in paradise, the bait of Eve 
Us'd by the tempter : on that prospect strange 
Their earnest eyes they fix'd, imagining 
For one forbidden tree a multitude 
Now risen, to work them further woe or shame : 
Yet parch'd with scalding thirst and hunger fierce, 
Though to delude them sent, could not abstain, 
But on they roll'd in heaps, and up the trees 
Climbing sat thicker than the snaky locks 
That curl'd Megsera : greedily they pluck'd 
The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew 
Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flam'd, 
This more delusive not the touch, but taste 
Deceiv'd ; they fondly thinking to allay 
Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit 
Chew'd bitter ashes, which the offended taste 
With spattering noise rejected : oft they assay'd 
Hunger and thirst constraining ; drugg'd as oft, 
With hatefullest disrelish writh'd their jaws 
With soot and cinders fill'd ; so oft they fell 
Into the same illusion." 2 

1 Paradise Lost, x, 513-520. 2 Ibid., 550-571. 



110 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

The character of sin which most impressed 
Dante was its insensibility. The sinful mind was 
dead to the presence of God in his universe. It 
failed to discern the gleam of the divine presence 
in the providences of life. Milton, on the other 
hand, emphasized most of all the lawlessness of 
evil, the wild anarchy which it introduced into the 
world, its tempests of passion, its audacious rebel- 
lion against heaven's eternal King. 

In his treatment of reconciliation the Puri- 
tan poet gives great prominence to a principle 
strangely neglected by theology, but to which 
our aroused social consciousness compels us to ac- 
cord due consideration. Sin's most dreadful curse 
is not its effect upon the one committing it, but 
the havoc wrought in the lives and hopes of others. 
To a contrite soul the woe which his sin flings upon 
the innocent is of more moment than the effect 
upon himself. A gospel would be an offense which 
shows him how to escape from the turbid stream 
of iniquity, but gives no word of hope for the 
victims of his wrong who are still struggling in 
the murky current. The consequences as well as 
the causes of sin must be included in any adequate 
salvation. A social as well as an individual re- 
demption is needed. Otherwise the sorrow entailed 
upon others would be forever a haunting spectre. 
No redeemed soul could live in eternal light with 
such a shadowed memory. There must be a re- 
conciliation with one's past, a tranquillity in the 



MILTON 111 

presence of sin's awful results, ere eternal peace can 
settle upon the soul. How this joyous serenity in 
the face of the fell entailment of sin may be ob- 
tained through Christ's work of redemption Mil- 
ton shows with singular clearness and impressive 
emphasis. 

After Adam had sinned, he would have de- 
served contempt if his supreme thought had been 
to escape the penalties of his transgression. Most 
truly does Milton declare that the bitterest woe 
of the first transgressor was the contemplation of 
the dreadful consequences visited upon his descen- 
dants. The thought of this awful entailment 
overcomes him, and he falls upon the ground in 
frenzied agony. His imperious need is an atone- 
ment which will provide for his sin's death-deal- 
ing effects upon others ; it is such a view of his 
past as will enable him to forgive himself. A 
revelation of God's love and pardon to him as an 
individual would be utterly inadequate. It is a 
social and not a personal atonement he craves. 

Milton here confronts the same problem which 
absorbed the attention of iEschylus. What power 
is sufficient to meet and stay the curse of sin when 
it is once unleashed ? The Greek tragedian viewed 
the question microscopically as it related to the 
family, while Milton surveys it in the larger aspect 
of humanity ; yet their replies are essentially the 
same. The curse of the house of Atreus is stayed 
when it lights upon Orestes, a good man who re- 



112 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

presents both contending parties and is obedient to 
the divine oracles. And Milton declares that the 
head of the serpent is bruised unto death by the 
heel of one who as Son of Man and of God by his 
perfect obedience wins the victory. 

When Adam sees his disobedience in the light 
of its destructive effects on his descendants, he 
repents. His remorse is not chiefly for his per- 
sonal loss, but for the far-reaching misery which 
will enfold others. That which will be to him a 
gospel is not the offer of a Heavenly Paradise, if 
he obediently endures his earthly wanderings ; 
but a revelation of how the dire consequences of 
his transgression are either expunged or turned 
to good. Without such knowledge of good tri- 
umphing over his evil there can be no soul rest 
for him, either in this world or the world to come. 
It is precisely this assuaging of the pain of 
memory through a vision of victorious righteous- 
ness for which Milton provides. Michael is sent 
to the sin-cursed Adam for his comfort. The 
angel takes him to a high hill — 

" from whose top 
The hemisphere of earth in clearest ken 
Stretch'd out to the amplest reach of prospect lay." 1 

From his eyes the film was removed by three 
drops from the well of life instilled, and he beholds 
in astounding vision the unfolding grace of God 
in redemption, until — 

1 Paradise Lost, xi, 378. 



MILTON 113 

" he, who comes thy Saviour, shall recure 
Not by destroying Satan, but his works 
In thee and in thy seed." 1 

Eaptured by the vision of Christ's perfect victory 
over sin — 

" our sire 
Replete with joy and wonder thus reply'd. 

goodness infinite, goodness immense ! 
That all this good of evil shall produce, 
And evil turn to good ; more wonderful 

Than that by which creation first brought forth 

Light out of darkness ! full of doubt I stand, 

Whether I shall repent me now of sin 

By me done and occasion'd, or rejoice 

Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring. 

To God more glory, more good will to men 

From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. 2 

When the vision had passed our first parent de- 
scended " greatly in peace of thought." He had 
found what he most craved, — a Lethe for his 
memory, a reconciliation with his past, a social 
and cosmic atonement, won by Christ's high 
triumph over sin. 

Before the "Paradise Lost" was published, 
young Ellwood, a friend of Milton, borrowed the 
manuscript. On returning it he said to the poet : 
" Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but 
what hast thou to say of Paradise found ? " The 
poet sat for some time in a state of abstraction, 
but returned no answer. " Paradise Regained " 
was his final reply. The result is radically differ- 
ent from what the prevalent theology of the time, 

1 Paradise Lost, xii, 393. 2 Ibid., xii, 467-478. 



114 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

with its strong accent on the sufferings of Christ, 
would have led us to suppose. We should have 
expected Milton to find his theme in the cup 
dripping with darkness and agony which the 
Father held to the lips of Christ in Gethsemane 
and in the fierce pains and spiritual gloom of 
Calvary ; for had not theology taught for a thou- 
sand years that the sufferings of Christ satisfied 
the righteous judgments of God? 

The insight of the poet pierces further into 
truth than the logic of the schoolman. Para- 
dise is regained by the victory, not the pains, of 
Christ. 

" Winning by conquest what the first man lost 
By fallacy unpriz'd." 1 

So the temptation in the wilderness was chosen, 
that triumph and not suffering might be the 
dominant note. 

" There shall he first lay down the rudiments 
Of his great warfare, ere I send him forth 
To conquer sin and death, the two grand foes, 
By humiliation and strong sufferance. 
His weakness shall o'ercome satanic strength, 
And all the world, and mass of sinful flesh ; 
That all the angels and sethereal powers, 
They now, and men hereafter, may discern, 
From what consummate virtue I have chose 
This perfect man, by merit call'd my Son, 
To earn salvation for the sons of men." 2 

The schools have taught expiation by suffering, 
a divine wrath appeased by torture, the pain of 

1 Paradise Lost, i, 154. 2 Ibid., i, 157-167. 



MILTON 115 

one accepted by a legal fiction for the condemna- 
tion of many. Milton opens a sunnier, healthier 
region of thought. To make forgiveness rational, 
there must indeed be a satisfaction given both to 
justice and to love ; but it is no legal fiction that 
is offered, — a real amendment is made ; the hurt 
of sin is healed ; its direful consequences are 
changed to good. 

Milton has here given us an element in reconcil- 
iation which is of commanding importance. There 
must be a social and cosmic atonement, an actual 
i/repair of the havoc of sin, else the individual 
whose sins have polluted the stream of humanity 
and entailed suffering upon others can never 
have an untormenting conscience or a tranquil 
memory. His Lethe is the insight of faith into 
the nature of God and the complete divine vic- 
tory over all evil. 



IX 

GEORGE ELIOT 



Sin and its reaction, pain eating away the sin, purity and wisdom 
through the suffering of sin, sin and its disclosure through conscience, 
— what else do we find in the great masterpieces of fiction and poetry, 
not indeed with slavish uniformity, hut as a dominant thought ? Haw- 
thorne wrote of little else ; it gives eternal freshness to his pages. It 
runs like a golden thread through the works of George Eliot and 
makes them other than they seem. For the most part the literature 
of the Occident is Christian ; I mean the great literature ; hut we 
must not expect to find all of Christianity in any one author. Work- 
ing, spirit-like, its method has been that of searching out those gifted 
ones whose mental note responded to some note in itself, and set them 
singing or speaking in that key. Thus it has worked, and we must 
look for Christianity in Literature not as though listening to one 
singer after another, but rather to a whole choir. — T. T. Mungbr. 



CHAPTER IX 

GEORGE ELIOT 

To avoid having our investigation extended to 
such a length as to become wearisome, and to 
prevent needless reiteration, in the study of mod- 
ern authors, of principles with which we are now 
familiar, we shall confine our attention to those 
books which treat of some special phase of re- 
conciliation. This method may elicit the criticism 
that the authors hereinafter studied are given in- 
adequate consideration, yet our theme will there- 
by gain much in clearness ; and we hope that the 
investigation will commend itself as trustworthy, 
even though confined to so narrow limits. 

In "Adam Bede" the problem of reconcilia- 
tion with one's past is treated in a very different 
mood from that pervading " Paradise Lost." It 
is necessary to recall the story only in barest out- 
line. The dramatis personae who are of interest 
to us for our present purpose are Arthur Don- 
nithorne, well-meaning, impulsive, heir to the 
estate of Hayslope ; Adam Bede, a strong, clear- 
headed, noble-minded carpenter ; and Hetty Sor- 
rel, pretty, vain, and shallow. Arthur's feeling 
for Hetty was a passing fancy, hot and passion- 



120 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ate, working her ruin. Adam Bede loved her 
from the deeps of his manly nature, and purposed 
making her his wife. Vividly and with rare 
power has George Eliot portrayed poor Hetty's 
sufferings, the birth of her child, her wanderings, 
her frenzied attempt to abandon the little one, 
and her sentence to death for child murder. 
When Arthur learned the awful results of what 
he had considered but a temporary lapse from 
virtue, with whole-hearted repentance and with 
tireless energy he set himself to do what he 
could to repair the evil, and succeeded in having 
Hetty's death sentence changed to one of trans- 
portation. The next day at evening the two men 
met by accident. Their warm friendship had 
been annulled by an irretrievable wrong. What 
reconciliation is possible! Adam's indignation 
was just and righteous. He certainly could not 
easily forgive one who had deeply injured him 
and ruined his promised bride. But when he 
sees the marks of suffering in Arthur's face, 
and learns of his determination to leave Hayslope 
and exile himself rather than have Adam and 
his friends forsake the estate, the heart of the 
sturdy carpenter is touched, and he gives his hand 
in forgiveness. His just indignation has been 
propitiated by Arthur's contrition, his suffering, 
and his endeavors to undo as much of the wrong 
as he can. Without such propitiation forgiveness 
would have been impossible. And Arthur's de- 



GEORGE ELIOT 121 

sire was surely not simply for happiness and per- 
sonal release from the awkward position in which 
his sin had placed him. His supreme purpose was 
to lessen the evil consequences of an irrevocable 
past. Yet the thought which shadowed them both 
was well expressed by Adam : " There 's a sort o' 
damage, sir, that can't be made up for." The 
irrevocableness of the past is one of George 
Eliot's fundamental teachings. A sin once 
launched into the world leaves a trail of blood 
and tears which can neither be forgotten nor ef- 
faced. A breach once made cannot be repaired. 
The reconciliation of Arthur Donnithorne and 
Adam Bede is only a friendly union hallowed by 
a common sorrow. It is a shadowed, incomplete 
reconciliation. The atonement is imperfect, for 
the consequences of evil cannot be stayed or their 
havoc amended. Poor Hetty was flung body and 
soul into an unlighted abyss of woe, and the 
memory of the tragedy casts a black and dismal 
shadow on the minds of her two lovers. Such 
measure of reconciliation as is possible, accord- 
ing to the rarely gifted and comprehensive mind 
of our author, is won by repentance, confession, 
and a suffering energy repairing in some degree 
the evil done. Arthur's suffering, his genuine 
repentance, and his partial rectification of the 
wrong propitiate a just indignation. Beyond 
this the author does not go. Arthur's last words 
were : " But you told me the truth when you 



122 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

said to me once, ' There 's a sort of wrong that 
can never be made up for.' ' George Eliot does 
not — 

" forecast the years, 
And find in loss a gain to match, 
Or reach a hand through time to catch 
The far-off interest of tears." 

She does not see with Milton a " Goodness im- 
mense" throwing its healing light and power 
into the abyss of the loss, nor does she say with 
Tennyson : — 

" O, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 



That not one life shall be destroy'd, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." 



X 

HAWTHORNE 



We meet at every turn, with Hawthorne, his favorite fancy of com- 
municated sorrows and inevitable atonements. Life is an experience 
in which we expiate the sins of others in the intervals of expiating 
our own. — Henky Jambs. 

What renders the " Scarlet Letter " one of the greatest of books is 
the sleuth-hound thoroughness with which sin is traced up and down 
and into every corner of the heart and life, and even into nature, 
where it transforms all things. Shakespeare paints with a larger 
brush, and sets it in great tragic happenings ; but its windings, the 
subtle infusion of itself into every faculty and impressing itself upon 
outward things, are left for Hawthorne's unapproachable skill. — 
T. T. Mungee. 






CHAPTER X 

HAWTHORNE 

The most powerful work of fiction which this 
country has produced is undoubtedly " The Scar- 
let Letter." As one moves with absorbed interest 
from page to page of this fascinating book, its 
resemblance to Dante's "Purgatorio" becomes im- 
pressive. Hester Prynne must change the scarlet 
letter A from a badge of infamy to a symbol 
of purity. Dante must wipe the seven P's from 
his forehead. The method of cleansing the stain 
of sin from the soul is identical. Dante sums it 
up in these words : confessio, contritio, satis- 
factio, symbolized in the three steps leading to 
the gate of justification. Over them all Hester 
climbed with patient feet, while Dimmesdale 
would tread them all but the clear mirror of con- 
fession. In many instances the language of the 
two books has a pronounced similarity. Not that 
Hawthorne consciously copied from Dante, for 
there is reason to believe that his familiarity with 
Italian literature began after " The Scarlet Letter" 
was written. But the sombre genius of the New 
Englander, as it penetrated into the spiritual 



126 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

problem which the Florentine had mined, found 
the same golden veins of truth. The scene of 
one is in Boston, and of the other on the Holy 
Mountain; but in both the interest centres in 
tracing the rugged and fiery path by which lib- 
erty from the stain and power of sin is attained. 
The weird and gloomy genius of the Protestant 
has drawn an even more terrible picture than did 
that of the mediaeval Catholic. Hawthorne's pur- 
pose was to show how Hester Prynne, who for 
the sin of adultery was condemned to wear the 
scarlet letter A exposed upon her bosom, and 
Arthur Dimmesdale, her unrevealed partner in 
guilt, purified their souls through purgatorial 
sufferings. So closely do the minds of these two 
powerful writers keep together in unfolding their 
common thought that sometimes almost identical 
forms of expression and experience are used. In 
one place Hawthorne employs a sentence to de- 
scribe the lot of his hero that reminds us very 
forcibly of Dante's famous account of his own 
experiences. Mr. Dimmesdale had chosen single 
blessedness ; therefore he is compelled " to eat 
his unsavory morsel always at another's board, 
and endure the lifelong chill which must be his 
lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's 
fireside." 1 Very similar is Dante's statement of 
his own homeless condition, in the well-known 
prophecy of Cacciaguida : — 

1 The Scarlet Letter, chap. ix. 



HAWTHORNE 127 

" Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt 
The bread of others, and how hard a road 
The going up and down another's stairs." 1 

No writer of recent times has given such con- 
spicuous emphasis to the need of confession as 
Hawthorne. Arthur Dimmesdale was sincerely 
repentant, and eager to expiate his sin ; but his 
quivering, supersensitive nature shrank from hon- 
est confession. But without confession his tor- 
tured soul is divided against itself. He must be 
known exactly as he is. 

" Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet 
letter openly upon your bosom ! Mine burns in 
secret ! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, 
after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look 
into an eye that recognizes me for what I am ! 
Had I a friend — or were it my worst enemy ! — 
to whom, when sickened with the praises of all 
other men, I could daily betake myself and be 
known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my 
soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even this 
much of truth would save me. But now it is all 
falsehood ! — all emptiness ! — all death ! " 2 

Yet a disclosure of himself to an individual is 
not sufficient. His sin had been against the com- 
munity. He is a member of the community, and 
to that he must be reconciled. Therefore he is 
made to stand upon the scaffold with Hester, that 
he may be seen by the world in his true character. 

1 Par. xvii, 58-60. 2 The Scarlet Letter, chap. xvii. 



128 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

As lie approached the place, old Koger Chilling- 
worth exclaimed : " Hadst thou sought the whole 
earth over there was no one place so secret — no 
high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst 
have escaped me, — save on this very scaffold ! " * 
Only by confession can he escape the power of his 
implacable enemy. When at last, amid the great 
awe of the multitude, he ascends the steps and re- 
veals the red stigma on his own bosom, symbol 
of his terrible secret, he dies in triumphant peace. 
This psychological need of confession Hawthorne 
again emphasizes in " The Marble Faun." The 
spotless soul of Hilda could not enfold the guilty 
secret of the murder she had witnessed. The mem- 
ory would not cease its torments until she found 
peace in unburdening her spirit — Protestant 
though she was — in a confessional. 

Another element in reconciliation is distinctly 
seen in the gloom and light of " The Scarlet Let- 
ter." When Hester, in the earlier chapters, was 
on the scaffold, she was nerved to encounter the 
taunts and merriment of the multitude ; but when 
instead of jeers she confronted a silence, solemn, 
judicial, awed, it was to her wild nature oppressive 
beyond endurance. Severe as the Puritans un- 
doubtedly were, the indignation the community 
felt at a destructive social evil was just. With 
this righteous condemnation of her fault Hester 
must deal, if reconciliation is to follow retribution. 

1 Ibid.y chap, xxiii. 



HAWTHORNE 129 

Repentance and confession are not sufficient ; there 
must be an appeasement of a just hostility to an 
influence which has worked and may still work 
injury to the community. Amends must be made, 
the effects of evil must be overcome ; Hester must 
bring forth fruits meet for repentance ; but what 
gives that fruit its value is that her new char- 
acter and good deeds counteract the contagious 
evil of her former life and make her a help and 
not a menace to the community. 

Through long years of service she propitiates 
— let us not shrink from the word, it represents 
a reality — the outraged moral sense of the town 
by the pure womanliness of her character and 
the beneficence of her deeds. Had she retired 
from the scaffold merely penitent, but with no 
settled purpose to atone for the wrong, her 
neighbors could not have given her an unre- 
served confidence. Had she lived a life of ease 
and prosperity, the just condemnation of the com- 
munity would not have been allayed. She must 
suffer, else sin will seem a slight thing, easily 
wiped out. Her sufferings must be great enough 
to make the crime appear hideous, and purity 
attractive. Without the shedding of blood, there 
is no remission. The offending person must live 
a sacrificial life if society is to forgive. 

This is another aspect of Hawthorne's funda- 
mental principle of confession. Not only must 
the individual know and confess his sin, but the 



130 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

sin must be so displayed and condemned that it 
shall appear loathsome to all. It is not to be 
glossed over or ignored, but known in its enor- 
mity by the forgiven and the forgiver, if recon- 
ciliation is to be rational and complete. Thus 
does Hester propitiate the righteous recoil of her 
social world from her by a suffering, benevolent 
life which robs her sin of all its fascination, trans- 
forms her character into a source of light and 
not darkness, and sets in motion numberless cur- 
rents of good which compensate for the evil she 
had done. 

Hester had committed a sin which militated 
against the social well-being. Society is righteous 
in the condemnation of the sin, and cannot fully 
forgive her until she is no longer in any way re- 
presentative of it. Repentance and confession 
but partially release her. She is still associated 
with it. Its nature will be judged by its painful 
effects upon her. If she lives a life of luxurious 
ease, her sin will appear but a soft infirmity, 
and not the destructive thing it is. Only by an 
earnest self-forgetfulness can the taint of sin 
be purged and she become to the community a 
savor of life and not of death. Without such 
evident contrition and conquest of her sin there 
can be no thorough propitiation of a proper so- 
cial judgment, and without such propitiation Hes- 
ter cannot enter harmoniously into the present 
life of the community. 



HAWTHORNE 131 

It should be noted that Hester won a greater 
degree of reconciliation with her neighbors than 
it was possible for Arthur Donnithorne to gain 
from Adam Bede. Adam genuinely forgave Ar- 
thur, but could not be perfectly reconciled to him, 
for the shadow of an irremediable loss prevented. 
Hester, however, was able by her life of faithful- 
ness and good deeds so far to overcome the evil 
effects of her transgression upon both herself and 
the town in which her lot was cast that she was 
not only forgiven, but received in abundant mea- 
sure evidences of her neighbors' reconciliation 
with her. Both Arthur Donnithorne and Hes- 
ter were forgiven, but to Hester was granted a 
greater degree of approval from the community 
she injured, because the social influences of her 
sin were checked and conquered by her chastened 
and benignant life, while Adam Bede could not 
have the same feelings of complacency, as his 
loss was irreparable. Reconciliation must be won 
by the complete triumph of good over evil. 



XI 
HOSEA AND TENNYSON 



Of all the prophets he [Hosea] was the first to break into the full 
aspect of the Divine Mercy — to learn and to proclaim that God is 
love. But he was worthy to do so by the patient love of his own heart 
toward another who for years had outraged all his trust and tender- 
ness. As he had loved Gomer, so God had loved Israel, past hope, 
against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy. Quivering 
with his own pain, Hosea had exhausted all human care and affection 
for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he declares God's 
love to be deeper than all the passion of meD, and broader than all 
their patience : Sow can I give thee up, Ephraim ? Sow can I let thee 
go, Israel ? I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger. — George 
Adam Smith. 

And all is well, tho' faith and form 

Be sunder'd in the night of fear ; 

Well roars the storm to those that hear 
A deeper voice across the storm. 

Tennyson. 



CHAPTER XI 

HOSEA AND TENNYSON 

Heretofore Occidental literature, Greek, Ital- 
ian, English, has occupied our attention. It will in- 
crease the range and effectiveness of our conclu- 
sions to glance into Oriental life. We open the 
Bible not to quote proof texts, but to ascertain 
how reconciliation was actually worked out by liv- 
ing souls in earlier days and in another civilization. 
As the need of propitiation has been brought to 
our attention both by Hawthorne and George 
Eliot, we shall first study the experiences of Hosea, 
in whose griefs the same necessity finds exposi- 
tion. Behind the somewhat cryptic sentences in 
which the prophet tells his sorrow, the story con- 
structs itself in this fashion. 

Hosea, a young Hebrew, refined, pure-minded, 
high-souled, marries Gomer, whom he believes 
to be as chaste as himself. How soon the shadow 
of suspicion of her unfaithfulness fell upon him 
we do not know, but her first child he acknow- 
ledged as his own. When the second child, a 
girl, was born, he called her " Unloved," or " That- 
never-knew-a-father's-pity." The third infant he 
named " Not-my-people." For a long time he 



136 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

bore with his impure companion, but at length 
she drifted from his home to go with strange 
paramours. She fell lower and lower, until, like 
members of her class, she ended in slavery. Yet 
all this time the eager heart of the prophet 
yearned for her, and his love followed her from 
step to step in her downward course, for the 
strength of love depends not upon the worthiness 
of the object loved, but upon the greatness of 
the heart which loves. Finally, when she had 
reached the depths of wretchedness, he bought 
her back at the price of a slave. 

" Weeping blinding tears 
I took her to myself and paid the price 
(Strange contrast to the dowry of her youth 
When first I wooed her) : and she came again 
To dwell beneath my roof." 

Yet he could not restore her immediately to the 
old relationship. "And I said to her, For many 
days shalt thou abide for me alone : thou shalt not 
play the harlot, thou shalt not be for any husband ; 
and I for my part also shall be so towards thee." 
Although the prophet's love had not faltered in 
his purpose to rescue his wife, yet his pure soul 
recoiled in the presence of her defilement. She 
was still too thoroughly identified with her sin, 
too stained by it, to admit of perfect reconciliation. 
Hosea felt that there must be an expiatory suf- 
fering, which should both purify her and propiti- 
ate an instinctive and just reserve on his part. 



HOSEA AND TENNYSON 137 

" In silence and alone, 
In shame and sorrow, wailing, fast and prayer 
She must blot out the stain that made her life 
One long pollution." 



In the fires of his experiences Hosea forged 
his evangel. If his love was so leal that it fol- 
lowed Gomer in all her wanderings until she was 
won back to righteousness, surely Jehovah, hav- 
ing loved Israel, would love them unto the end, 
and would redeem them in righteousness. 

The principles upon which reconciliation is 
made possible are clear. The efficient cause comes 
not from the transgressor, but from the great 
heart sinned against. Love suffering and exhaust- 
less sought out the defiled one. Yet all exhi- 
bitions of Hosea's affection did not win Gomer 
to the paths of rectitude. She came to herself in 
view of the consequences of her sin rather than 
through the persuasions of the prophet's love. 
Still it was the unwearying love of Hosea that 
found her at the psychical moment, pardoned, 
and brought her back. But holy love cannot 
ignore moral distinctions. There is an impassable 
barrier between purity and impurity. The wrong- 
doer must not only repent, but must also live 
in such a manner as to realize and honor fun- 
damental moral distinctions, thus appeasing an 
aversion which is both instinctive and righteous. 
Sin taints and stains ; even genuine repentance 
does not at once purify and render the evil an 



138 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

alien thing, so entirely disassociated from the sin- 
ful one that it offers no obstacle to complacent 
love. It is too definitely associated with the per- 
petrator to be treated as though it were not. 
Marvelous as was Hosea's affection, both in its 
strength and in its tirelessness, it was too pure 
and sensitive not to shrink from his polluted wife. 
Something must be done, or felt, or thought 
before a benevolent love can become complacent. 
Hosea would propitiate this instinctive aversion 
of his own refined nature, the moral sense of the 
community, and G-omer's natural disgust with 
herself, by enjoining upon her to live such a life 
of purity that she should become a new crea- 
ture dissociated from her past, and able to be 
received without detriment into the old relation- 
ship. 

Tennyson, in the " Idylls of the King," recounts 
precisely the same experiences and feelings. 
King Arthur began his reign with a noble ideal 
of a just and prosperous kingdom. His knights 
of the Round Table furthered his fair design 
until the hapless day when the queen fell a 
victim to her guilty love for Lancelot. "Red 
ruin and the breaking up of laws " was the result. 
Arthur's exalted ideal was shattered, his kingdom 
rent with civil war, and overrun by an invasion 
of barbarian hordes. The queen fled to a convent, 
where Arthur sought her out ere he went to en- 
gage in that last fateful battle of the West. As 



HOSEA AND TENNYSON 139 

Guinevere heard the clang of his mailed feet 
along the cloister halls, she fell prone upon the 
floor in deep repentance. The king is Tennyson's 
ideal of noblest man, and he came not in anger. 

" Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
Forgives ; do thou for thine own soul the rest. 

I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine. 



I cannot take thy hand ; that too is flesh 

And in the flesh thou hast sinn'd ; and mine own flesh 

Here looking down on thine polluted, cries 

* I loathe thee ; ' yet not less, O Guinevere, 

For I was ever virgin save for thee, 

My love through flesh hath wrought into my life 

So far, that my doom is, I love thee still. 

Perchance, and thou so purify thy soul, 

And so thou lean on our fair father Christ, 

Hereafter in that world where all are pure 

We two may meet before high God, and thou 

Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know 

I am thine husband — not a smaller soul, 

Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that, 

I charge thee, my last hope." 

The king loved and forgave the unhappy 
queen, and yet he could not take her to his breast 
in one last embrace, before he went to his death. 
An instinctive revulsion from her polluted body 
restrained him. There could not be perfect re- 
conciliation until through Christ her very nature 
was changed. 

The queen, too, recognized this stain. 

" The shadow of another cleaves to me, 
And makes me one pollution." 



140 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 
Yet reconciliation is not impossible : — 

" In mine own heart I can live down sin, 
And be his mate hereafter in the heavens 
Before high God." 

And so in "almsdeed and in prayer" she wears 
out — 

" The sombre close of that voluptuous day 
Which wrought the ruin of my lord, the king." 

Hosea and Tennyson both alike attest that the 
holiest love conceivable in a human bosom is 
checked in its passion for perfect reconciliation 
by a revulsion from evil which cannot be ignored, 
but must be allayed. 



XII 

JOB, THE SUFFERING SERVANT, PSALM XVII, 
SYMONDS, WHITMAN, WHITTIER 



And I saw that there was an Ocean of Darkness and Death ; but an 
Infinite Ocean of Light and Love flowed over the Ocean of Darkness ; 
and in that I saw the Infinite Love of God. — George Fox. 

My hope is that a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 

That after Last returns the First, 
Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 

That what began best, can't end worst, 
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst. 

Kobert Browning. 



CHAPTER XII 

JOB, THE SUFFERING SERVANT, PSALM XVII, 
SYMONDS, WHITMAN, WHITTIER 



There is another phase of our subject well 
worthy of consideration — a phase touched upon 
by Dante and more fully developed by Shake- 
speare. Most of the plots we have studied trace 
the methods by which persons alienated by sin 
have been joined in a harmonious union. Life 
in its darkest aspects has engaged our attention. 
We have contemplated exceptional experiences. 
In the ordinary course of existence we do not 
often confront such tragedy and its widespread- 
ing gloom. Humanity's most familiar problem is 
to become reconciled to the limitations and disci- 
pline of life itself. The world is not to our mind. 
The conditions upon which life is given to us 
are not as we would have them. We dream our 
dreams, project our glowing ideals, lay our plans 
for the future, only to be thwarted by circum- 
stances beyond our control. We choose our path 
and walk in it with joy until we find ourselves 
confronted by some stern obstacle of duty rising 
sheer before us, and we turn back with rebellious^ 
hearts. To make " I will " surrender joyfully to 
r I must " requires many a severe battle. " Must " 



144 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

is probably the most disliked word in our lan- 
guage. The lover never speaks it. The devotee 
of liberty will die rather than obey it. Yet to 
bring the individual will into joyful acquiescence 
with inexorable necessity is life's hardest task 
and most important achievement. Conscious sin 
is not in ordinary experience the chief deterrent 
to union with God. Rather the difficulty lies in 
adjusting our lives to the inevitable order of 
events. Keligion, in the opinion of Professor 
James, is an u enthusiastic temper of espousal 
toward the universe." It is the glad acceptance 
of God's ways with men. It is loving him with 
the mind. Thus it is reconciliation with God's 
providential revelation of himself in individual 
and national history, rather than the forgive- 
ness of sins, which most interests the modern 
man. 

It is in the book of Job that this problem 
finds its classical and noblest expression. 

In the early days the simple faith of the 
Hebrew was satisfied with the belief that suf- 
fering was Jehovah's penalty upon wrong-doing, 
and happiness and prosperity his reward of right- 
eousness. But a broader view of life and a clear 
knowledge of how often the innocent are afflicted 
while the wicked flourish, easily disproved the 
primitive, undiscriminating philosophy. 

The book of Job grew out of that period of 
intense spiritual struggle when the Hebrew mind 



JOB 145 

— always keenly alive to the eternal mysteries — 
grappled afresh with masculine energy the still 
unsolved enigma of the meaning of the evil which 
settles upon the righteous. The three friends 
bring their little systems of theology — the ac- 
cepted notions of the day — to comfort the deep, 
tumultuous, sorrowing heart of Job. A few 
months before the patriarch would have agreed 
with their philosophies, but his bitter experi- 
ences had opened new abysses of life, his soul 
had gone down into a darkness too profound to 
be reached by the sickly light of their childish 
theories. Fiercely he retorts, silencing their chat- 
ter and boldly asserting his integrity. When 
his lacerated heart has exhausted itself in use- 
less ragings, and his mind has come to realize 
its own impotency in the presence of the infi- 
nite mystery, then God answers Job out of the 
whirlwind, teaching his stricken spirit that not in 
speculations about God, but in the consciousness 
of God himself, is the final peace and the unrav- 
elment of all difficulties. 

The significant religious teaching of this bril- 
liant book is that suffering is not merely God's 
punishment of wrong-doing ; it is also one of his 
methods of testing character ; it is something to 
be heroically endured that it may accomplish its 
perfect work, and the recompense is that vision 
of divine grace which only can give peace. The 
sufferer is satisfied that God in all this disciplinary 



146 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

training has been just. The reward atones for 
all the pain, and he can say joyfully : — 

" I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear ; 
But now mine eye seeth thee." 

In the power of that vision all querulous com- 
plaints seem to be a rebellion against divine love, 
and the penitent exclaims : — 

" Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent 
In dust and ashes." x 

It is this revelation of God to the soul and the 
soul's answering trust in the justice and mercy of 
God's providential dealings that is the full and 
adequate compensation. The afflicted patriarch is 
reconciled to life when he is convinced of the 
benevolent purposes of God in it. There is not a 
minute explanation of the meaning of every loss, 
but instead there is such a supreme consciousness 
of God's presence and goodness that the mind in 
joyful acquiescence ceases its questionings and the 
will its rebellion. 

It will hardly be disputed that the spiritual 
insight and literary power of the Old Testament 
reaches its culmination in the latter part of the 
book of Isaiah, and that in the pathetic and 
strangely beautiful fifty-third chapter the inspi- 
ration of the prophet attains its highest point. 

The great Prophet of the Exile has pondered 
long on the old problems of redemption and suf- 

1 Job xlii, 5. 



THE SUFFERING SERVANT 147 

fering, and his explanation is so startling that 
no one will believe his report. Suffering, he de- 

l clares, is more than a penalty upon wrong-doing, 
it is more even than a permitted test of char- 
acter, — it is one of God's chief instruments in 

I redemption. It pleases him to bruise his Servant 
that through his stripes others may be healed. 
It was an epochal day in the world's religious 
history when the truth was uttered that vicari- 
ous suffering is one of God's elect and honored 
methods in salvation. 

In the fervor of his utterance the prophet 
shows the cause which gives to the Sufferer pro- 
found peace in the furnace of his afflictions. 

" But Jehovah had purposed to bruise him, 
Had laid on him sickness ; 
So if his life should offer guilt-offering, 
A seed he should see, he should lengthen his days. 
And the purpose of Jehovah by his hand should prosper, 
From the travail of his soul shall he see, 
By his knowledge be satisfied." 1 

The glory of the result reconciled the Servant to 
the process. Insight into the significance of his 
troubles took away every murmur. If he saw it 
was God's hand which held the cup to his lips, he 
could drink it. 

This is certainly true teaching. We can be 
reconciled to life in its severest aspects if we are 
confident that the disasters are not meaningless, 
and that j the valley of weeping can be made a 

1 Isaiah liii, 10, 11. 



148 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

\ place of springs. ) All that we need to endure 
any tribulation is either the perception that it 
issues in a worthy result or the firm conviction 
that it is wisely ordered and that good will come 
out of evil. 

We shall mention but one more Old Testament 
passage. In the Seventeenth Psalm the writer 
represents himself as beset with calamities, yet 
he knows that God is just. He does not ask for 
wealth or prosperity, but that in righteousness 
he may behold God's face. This beatific vision 
which comes to the soul in its most luminous mo- 
ments is ample satisfaction for the losses and 
afflictions of life. 

Modern writers are constantly referring to this 
ceaseless struggle of the sensitive soul with the 
grim facts of the world. They differ from the 
ancients more in forms of expression and method 
of approach than in their essential conclusions. 
John Addington Symonds gives a most noble 
description of the tortuous path by which a spirit, 
gifted with literary insight and steeped in modern 
scientific thought, finally found a satisfying faith 
which gave rest to his soul and girded his will with 
sufficient strength to fight life's battle with joy. 
Having lost the belief of his earlier years, he was 
advised by Comte to sit down contentedly and five 
without God. This he could not do. First the 
hymn of Cleanthes, suggesting the moral attitude 
of willing submission to universal law, gave to 



SYMONDS 149 

him a groundwork for a new faith. The reading 
of Marcus Aurelius and Goethe led him to believe 
that a religion which he called the religion of 
" cosmic enthusiasm " was the only one compatible 
with the agnosticism forced upon a candid mind. 
" Nothing but the bare thought of a God-pene- 
trated universe, and of myself as an essential part 
of it, . . . satisfied me as a possible object of 
worship. When this thought flooded me, and 
filled the inmost fibres of my sentient being, I 
discovered that I was almost at rest about birth 
and death, and moral duties, and the problem of 
immortality. These were the world's affairs, not 
mine. Having lost the consolations of faith in 
redemption through Christ, and all that pertains 
thereto, I had gained in exchange this, that I 
could — 

lay myself upon the knees 
Of Doom, and take my everlasting ease." 

Then a copy of Walt Whitman's " Leaves of 
Grass " came in his way. Here he found the same 
essential faith. Especially did he feel that this 
religion of "cosmic enthusiasm" was lived by the 
distinguished scientists of his day. " They threw 
themselves upon the world and God with simple 
self-devotion, . . . casting the burden of results 
upon that or him who called them into being, 
standing unterrified, at ease, before time, space, cir- 
cumstance, and any number of sidereal systems." l 

1 Life of John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, pp. 323 ff. 



150 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Whitman's reconciliation with life was due to 
the same mystical experience. His strong expres- 
sion of faith is familiar. 

" I believe in you, my soul . . . 

Loaf e with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat ; . . . 

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. 

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. . . . 

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge 

that pass all the argument of the earth, 
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, 
And I know that the spirit of God is brother of my own, 
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the 

women my sisters and lovers, 
And that a kelson of the creation is love." 

In a soberer way he has elsewhere expressed the 
same thought. " There is apart from mere intel- 
lect, in the make-up of every superior human 
identity, a wondrous something that realizes with- 
out argument, frequently without what is called 
education (though I think it is the goal and apex 
of all education deserving the name), an intuition 
of the absolute balance in time and in space, of 
the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of 
fools, and incredible make-believe and general un- 
settledness, we call the world ; a soul-sight of that 
divine clue and unseen thread which holds the 
whole congeries of things, all history and time, 
and all events, however trivial, however momen- 
tous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. 
Of such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind 
mere optimism explains only the surface." 

1 Poem entitled Song of Myself. 

2 Quoted in James's The Varieties of Beligious Experience, p. 396. 



WHITTIER 151 

This " soul-sight " of the unseen thread running 
through all events, without which great poetry is 
impossible, has received an equally strong utter- 
ance in Milton. At the close of " Samson Ago- 
nistes " the chorus exclaims : — 

" All is best, though we oft doubt, 
What th' unsearchable dispose 
Of highest wisdom brings about, 
And ever best found in the close." 

While Whittier in a moment of lofty spiritual 
exaltation wrote the "Eternal Goodness," in which 
the whole philosophy of his reconciliation with 
life and all its apparent blighting cruelties burst 
forth into sweetest music. 

" I know not what the future hath 
Of marvel or surprise, 
Assured alone that life and death 
His mercy underlies. 



And so beside the Silent Sea 

I wait the muffled oar ; 
No harm from Him can come to me 

On ocean or on shore. 

I know not where His islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond His love and care." 

This mood, which was not exceptional, but reveals 
his habitual attitude toward life, was again voiced 
in " My Birthday." 

" I grieve not with the moaning wind 
As if a loss befell; 



152 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Before me, even as behind, 
God is, and all is well. 

" His light shines on me from above, 
His low voice speaks within, — 
The patience of immortal love 
Outwearying mortal sin." 

We would not imply that this is the only or even 
the characteristic mood of the literary seers and 
prophets of to-day. Some shout out the old sto- 
ical defiance : — 

" It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll; 
I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul." 

Others advocate the outworn Epicurean prescrip- 
tion to lick the honey of life and forget the 
dragon at the bottom of the pit and the mice 
gnawing the roots of the tree of life. But the 
authors quoted show the only method of recon- 
ciliation with the whole of life. Their " rapturous 
espousal of the universe," " cosmic enthusiasm," 
or trust in the " Eternal Goodness " is the only 
solution which will meet all the exigencies of our 
experience and at the same time be an unfailing 
joy to the heart and strength to the will. 






PART II 

I 
DEDUCTIONS 



/ There is no principle involved in the atonement that is not in 
j eluded in its essence in the most sacred relations between man and 
I man. — Phillips Brooks. 

I am striving- to bring the God which is in me into harmony with 
the God which is in the Universe. — Plotinus. 

No true thinker dissents when the process of history is denned as 
reconciliation. — T. T. Munger. 



CHAPTER I 



DEDUCTIONS 



Sin, Retribution, Forgiveness. 

Having taken so extensive a journey among 
the masterpieces of literature, where we have 
found not merely individual opinion crystallized, 
but the aspirations and philosophy of great epochs 
given imperishable form, the profitable task 
remains of summarizing the knowledge gained. 
Then will come the greater work of deducing a 
generalization from the facts ascertained and sys- 
tematized. 

The different characteristics of sin which have 
appealed to various authors afford an engaging 
study. The view one takes of sin is conditioned 
by his conception of God. Homer, to whom the 
Supreme is the sum of all forces both good and 
evil, portrays sin as a blind following of impulse. 
This folly is often a spell sent by the gods, from 
which one does not escape until his eyes are 
opened. The immediate consequences are the 
defilement of the wrong-doer and the woe falling 
indiscriminately on both innocent and guilty. 
The defilement of sin is a permanent possession 
of religious thought. The forms in which it has 



156 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

appeared are protean : the lustral washing of the 
ancients, the Purgatory of the Catholic Church, 
Daniel O'Connell refusing to uncover in the pre- 
sence of his Maker the hand which had killed a 
man in a duel, Hawthorne's quaint story of "The 
Minister's Black Veil " are illustrations. 

^Eschylus and Sophocles, while touching upon 
the stain of sin, are chiefly concerned with its 
continuous and widespread results. Sin taints the 
blood for generations ; it disturbs the equilibrium 
of an inexorable moral system and evokes a 
frightful reprisal, destroying the innocent with 
the guilty. Dante affirms that spiritual blindness 
is sin's chief characteristic. " We have come," 
says Virgil, " to the place where I told thee that 
thou shalt see the woeful people who have lost 
the good of the understanding." l These stricken 
souls could not see God's justice, truth, and good- 
ness shining through and giving significance to 
the untoward events of life. The issue of sin as 
portrayed in Lucifer is hideous and benumbed 
selfishness. In Milton's " Paradise Lost " sin is 
born of pride, erects a pandemonium of law- 
lessness, and degenerates into serpentine cunning 
and reptilian character. Shakespeare's Iago is 
crafty, morally blind, and contemptible. As we 
have already seen, the different characteristics of 
sin in Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton cannot be 
judged by the same standards. Milton portrays 

1 Inferno, iii. 



DEDUCTIONS 157 

sin as it was in the beginning, fair, resourceful, 
challenging our admiration; Shakespeare depicts 
it as it appears now in human shape, a worldly 
thing, mean, havoc-making, malignant ; Dante 
lifts the curtain upon its final condition of fool- 
ish, sodden, repulsive monstrosity, without a re- 
deeming trait. 

About the certainty of retribution there is per- 
fect unanimity. Nemesis follows hard after every 
transgressor. How one blind moment of folly 
blights the life of the individual, and spreads its 
leprosy from the individual to the family, and 
from the family to the state, this is a constant 
theme. There is no uncertainty here. The retri- 
bution of sin is sure, swift, terrible, casting far 
its poisoned net and entangling sinner and saint, 
the mature and the unborn in its fearful toils. 
The interpreters of the spiritual world are one in 
their vision of the reality of the moral order and 
the certainty of its recoil whenever it is disturbed 
by sin. The prophets of every age, country, and 
religion see eye to eye in this matter ; they all 
speak the same warning. It has been felicitously 
said that the frontispiece of every one of George 
Eliot's works might fittingly be a pair of scales 
and a sword. The same symbol would serve for 
all the world's literary masterpieces. The sure 
movement of the scales and the flash of the sword 
are seen in them all. 

In the unfolding of the principles upon which 



158 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

forgiveness is won, our authors bring to light 
some facts well worthy of consideration. We are 
surprised to note their unanimity in declaring 
that the chief restraint upon the sinner in his 
downward course is a revelation of the conse- 
quences of his wrong. The religious mind, 
under the tuition of modern theology, has been 
taught to believe that the manifestation of the 
divine love in Christ is the supreme power in 
awakening a dead conscience ; and the discovery 
that the force of declared love is almost entirely 
neglected in the masterpieces gives us cause for 
reflection. Achilles is cured of his obstinacy 
only when he sees the widespread slaughter of 
the Greeks ; CEdipus knows his fault in the 
plague that lights upon Thebes; it is because 
Dante finds himself in a dark wood that he fol- 
lows Eeason and walks the upward way; Shake- 
speare kindles the fires of remorse when the 
guilty soul beholds the havoc of its iniquities ; 
Milton depicts Adam as coming to a realization 
of his disobedience through a knowledge of 
the curse which is to fall on him and on his 
race. Arthur Donnithorne perceives that his sin 
is more than a slight infirmity when Hetty is 
charged with murder. The prodigal son comes 
to himself when he eats with swine. 

The quickening into life of a conscience dead 
in trespasses and sins must not be confused 
with the enkindling of a sense of personal guilt. 



DEDUCTIONS 159 

The latter is quite another experience, and is 
originated in a very different way. It came to 
Dante as he stood before the stern face of Bea- 
trice ; it came to the prodigal when he saw him- 
self in the light of his father's forgiveness and 
love; it comes to the Christian as he measures 
himself by the holiness of Christ. Love opens 
the eyes of the transgressor to the consequences 
of sin, not first of all to its own glories. The 
preaching of God's compassion may give to the 
awakened conscience a keener sense of personal 
guilt; but something quite different arouses a 
dead conscience to activity. 

The great authors are one also in their convic- 
tion that there are certain conditions to be ful- 
filled before the old relationships can be resumed 
between those who have been alienated. Their 
unanimous testimony is beautifully summarized 
and symbolized in Dante's three steps leading to 
the gate of justification. There must be contri- 
tion, confession, satisfaction. 

That pardon is impossible without repentance 
needs no argument. The guilty soul must be truly 
sorry for the wrong done, and turn from the 
evil in genuine contrition of spirit. Confession 
is the natural outgrowth of full penitence. A 
man determined upon thorough righteousness 
wishes to be known in his true character. He 
will wish the light to penetrate him and his 
deeds. He will be honest with himself, with the 



160 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

world, and with God. While the spiritual neces- 
sity of confession is generally recognized, it finds 
its most important emphasis in Dante and Haw- 
thorne. 

There is substantial agreement also that all 
possible satisfaction must be rendered to those 
who are injured in order to restore a perfect har- 
mony. How the breach is filled up with satis- 
factory deeds has received many interpretations. 
If complete reparation is possible, then it must 
be made. Agamemnon must restore to the priest 
his daughter, and give back Briseis to Achilles. 
But most sins are so subtle and far-reaching that 
man cannot undo the evil he has done. His re- 
sources are pitifully inadequate for reparation. 
Forgiveness then depends upon the magnanimity 
of the one who has been wronged ; it is not pur- 
chased, but is an act flowing out of a benignant 
nature; yet this free pardon is something more 
than a gush of good-natured impulse. Invariably 
it is a righteous act, in perfect accord with the 
requirements of moral law. As one turns the 
pages of Scripture and literature with the thought 
of the essential nature of forgiveness in mind, 
interest changes to wonder and wonder passes 
into the profound conviction that one is confront- 
ing an elemental truth on perceiving that every 
genuine pardon of transgression is so given that 
sin becomes hateful and the sanctity of the moral 
order of the world is revealed in its majesty and 



DEDUCTIONS 161 

attractiveness. To this there is no exception. 
Forgiveness, to be genuine, must be so bestowed 
that moral obligations receive no diminution. 
The many forms in which this intuitive belief is 
expressed add impressiveness to the unanimity 
of the testimony. In Dante the sanction of the 
eternal justice is maintained by the infliction of 
a penalty equivalent to the enormity of the sin, 
Christ bearing the eternal retribution and sin- 
ners the temporal pains. Thus God makes the 
scales to balance ere he forgives. In "(Edipus 
Tyrannus," sufferings not commensurate, but 
adequate to demonstrate the inviolability of the 
divine decrees, are inflicted. iEschylus presents 
another phase of satisfaction when he describes 
Orestes, a righteous man, enduring vicariously 
the consequences of the transgressions of others 
and by obedience and sorrow setting at rest the 
Furies of retributive justice. This is still more 
strongly asserted in the remarkable passage at 
the close of u Prometheus Bound : " — 

" Do not look 
For any end, moreover, of this curse, 
Or ere some god appear to accept thy pangs 
On his own head vicarious, and descend 
With unreluctant step the darks of hell 
And gloomy abysses around Tartarus." 1 

In the case of some of the authors whom we 
have investigated, the point of view shifts from 
the government of God to the conscience of the 

1 E. B. Browning's trans. 



162 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

individual. The moral order without is reflected 
by the moral sense within, and the writer deals 
with the problem of so declaring forgiveness 
that the conscience of neither the forgiver nor 
the forgiven shall suffer offense. Pardon is still 
emphasized as righteous, and the attention is 
turned from the satisfaction of the law to the 
satisfaction of moral instincts and judgment. 

Adam Bede is a just man. He cannot readily 
forgive Arthur Donnithorne for the betrayal of 
Hetty. What is best in his nature is aroused and 
clamant. His indignation is true and righteous. 
Yet when he sees the furrows of sorrow on Ar- 
thur's face and recognizes how completely the one 
who has injured him is bringing forth fruits meet 
for repentance, his wrath is allayed, and he for- 
gives to the best of his ability. 

King Arthur's love for Guinevere was holy. 
Its very purity made him shrink with greater hor- 
ror from the shame of his queen. His devotion 
was not so slight a thing that it could by any 
possibility overlook moral distinctions, but the 
queen's overwhelming contrition quenched the 
flaming Sinai of his indignation. Her repent- 
ance made possible holy love; his love could be 
both pitying and righteous, and he could say, — 

" Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
Forgives." 

Neither Guinevere nor Arthur Donnithorne 
would have felt forgiven had each not realized 



DEDUCTIONS 163 

that the new attitude towards the past, the sor- 
row, penitence, and effort to undo the evil so far 
as possible, was a real homage to the laws of mo- 
rality which had been broken. The principle of 
propitiation to conscience, to the holiness of love, as 
a condition of forgiveness, is clearly recognized by 
George Eliot, Tennyson, Hosea in his treatment 
of Gomer, and Hawthorne in his portrayal of 
how Hester Prynne won her way to the forgive- 
ness of the stern Puritan community by meeting 
the demands of their rigorous consciences. iEs- 
chylus, Sophocles, and Dante are interested in 
the satisfaction of the moral government of God ; 
Hosea, Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Tennyson 
call attention to the inner satisfaction or propitia- 
tion of outraged conscience and holiness. 

Our investigations justify these conclusions. 
Sin is forgivable. But no matter how earnestly 
the injured one wishes to wipe out the offense, 
there are certain conditions which must be fulfilled. 
The one who is forgiven must have an ade- 
quate apprehension of his transgression ; that is, 
he must know and be known for what he is by all 
the persons concerned. He must also be genuinely 
repentant, and, to the extent of his ability, make 
reparation for the evil committed. But forgive- 
ness, to be real, must be righteous ; it must in no 
way minimize sin, or diminish the sanctions of 
the moral order, or offend the holiness of love or 
the instincts of conscience. The authors we have 



164 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

studied are unanimous in this, although they 
differ according to their temperament and train- 
ing in their teaching of the methods by which 
law and conscience are satisfied. 

Invariably, also, both in literature and in life, 
the austerity and authority of the moral law are 
revealed by the sufferings which the infraction 
of moral relationships entails. The sufferings may 
be merited or vicarious, but they are an indis- 
pensable condition of forgiveness. Without the 
shedding of blood there is no remission. The 
moral order always makes known its violation 
by the penalty it exacts, and the resulting woe 
reveals the authority of the ethical world. 

We are warranted, therefore, in affirming that 
if there is a disposition on the part of the in- 
jured one to forgive, and genuine repentance in 
the heart of the wrong-doer, there is no obstacle 
to complete pardon, provided the mercy is so 
granted and accepted that the true nature of the 
wrong is understood by both parties, and the 
sanctities of moral obligation receive no weak- 
ening. 

Reconciliation. 

Eeconciliation is a larger question than for- 
giveness. It includes forgiveness, and then 
stretches out over new experiences and needs. 
The penitent may know that he is forgiven ; but 
can he forgive himself ? Pardon does not perforce 



DEDUCTIONS 165 

make him complacent with his past. His will 
may have gone wholly over to the good ; his heart 
may rest in a sweet sense of forgiveness ; but his 
conscience may still be a flaming pillar of remorse, 
and his memory a Gehenna of torment. Forgive- 
ness is only an element in reconciliation. For- 
giveness need concern but two persons, while 
reconciliation may demand the reorganization of 
the universe. Forgiveness does not wipe out the 
fact of sin, nor the memory of it, nor its conse- 
quences. There can be no unshadowed and per- 
fectly restored relationships unless the memories 
of both the offender and the offended one can 
dwell at peace beside the forgiven offense. The 
stricken mind of Macbeth instinctively felt that 
his horror-crammed memory presented the great- 
est obstacle to peace. He cries to his physician : 

" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart ? " 1 

Milton's Adam mav believe his sin to be forgiven, 
but his personal deliverance is of slight moment. 
How can he dwell in celestial light, with a black- 
ened memory and the knowledge that his sin 
is ranging on in ever-increasing destructiveness 
through the generations of men ? Job acknow- 
ledges no need of forgiveness. He is willing to 

1 Macbeth, V, sc. in. 



166 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

maintain his integrity in the presence of his Maker, 
yet he is reconciled to neither past nor present, 
to neither man nor God. King Arthur forgives 
Guinevere, but he clearly affirms that reconcili- 
ation is at present impossible. Hereafter, when 
certain conditions have been fulfilled, they may be 
brought into perfect reunion before High God. 
Certainly the queen is not at peace with her- 
self. 

Many of the seers of literature do not hesitate 
to affirm that perfect reconciliation is impossible. 

" The moving Finger writes ; and having writ 
Moves on ; not all your Piety nor Wit 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it." * 

An irrevocable past throws a perpetual shadow. 
It may be forgiven, but not joyously acquiesced 
in. The reader will recall Adam Bede's pathetic 
statement : " There 's a sort of wrong that can 
never be made up for." 

But many of the authors we have examined re- 
cognized a principle which changes tragedy into 
happiness, and by a divine alchemy transmutes 
remorse into peace, and profound sorrows into 
songs of rejoicing. 

Dante wrote the Divine Comedy instead of the 
Divine Tragedy, because the most embittered life 
may have a happy ending. The soul may expe- 
rience a Lethe which can "cleanse the stuff'd 

1 Uubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, lxxi. 



DEDUCTIONS 167 

bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon 
the heart." It has its Eunoe of reinvigoration, 
and it will finally raise its look unto the Eternal 
Goodness, and in beholding him have peace. 

When Shakespeare retired from the stage, he 
indicated in "The Tempest" those conceptions of 
life in its ultimate meanings which enabled him 
to look without disquiet on the sufferings and 
wrongs which he had experienced. He represents 
Prospero as reconciled to his enemies and with 
tranquil mind looking back over the years. The 
enchanter can so readily forget all hardships 
and forgive all wrongs, because his unobstructed 
power has brought good out of evil. His realiza- 
tion of the final good compensates for the severity 
of the process. Had Miranda been ruined by the 
lust of Caliban, and Prospero's own life been hope- 
lessly crippled by the malignity of his foes, he 
might have forgiven them and submitted to his 
cruel lot with composed resignation ; but genuine 
reconciliation, either with the past or with the 
providential order of the world, would have been 
impossible. Reconciliation resulted from the vic- 
tory which his good-will won over all evil. The 
good had conquered, and had set the wrong right. 
The wound caused by sin was healed. This was 
the basis of his acquiescence in the experiences 
of life and the source of his satisfaction. What 
reconciled Prospero was also the reconciliation of 
the Master who created him. I do not think we 



168 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

overstate the truth when we assert that Shake- 
speare's belief in "some soul of goodness in things 
evil, " a goodness which subdues evil and makes 
it minister to a higher well-being, was the ground 
of his own contentment. Milton affirms that for 
Adam there was no painless blessedness until from 
a high mountain he saw how God was to display 
the splendor of redeeming grace through his 
transgression, while the plinth upon which the 
finely wrought superstructure of " Paradise Ee- 
gained " is reared is the doctrine that Christ's vic- 
torious life is the compensation for the sin of the 
world and the open gate through which all men 
may pass to everlasting felicity. 

Job lays his hand upon his mouth when he 
hears God's answer out of the whirlwind of his 
troubles, and is satisfied that His way has been 
true and righteous ; Isaiah's Suffering Servant is 
satisfied with the travail of his soul when he sees 
his seed and the pleasure of the Lord prospering 
at his hand ; and the Psalmist knows he cannot 
be satisfied or reconciled until he sees the Lord 
face to face. King Arthur could forgive Guine- 
vere out of the greatness of his love, but recon- 
ciliation was impossible so long as the stain of 
her sin was upon her, and his mortal eyes could 
behold only red ruin and the breaking up of 
laws. But his faith and hope reached beyond, 
and he intimates that when they meet before 
High God, her own sin conquered, and the divine 



DEDUCTIONS 169 

work in the world perfected, then he can take 
her to himself in shadowless reconciliation. 

Through these many witnesses we have a prin- 
ciple of reconciliation very clearly attested. Perfect 
accord between God and man, or between injured 
and injurer, or between man and his past and 
present, depends upon the supremacy of Good over 
evil. This triumphant goodness may be realized, 
as by Prospero in " The Tempest," or it may be 
seen in vision, as in Dante, Milton, Isaiah's Suffer- 
ing Servant, and the writer of the Seventeenth 
Psalm ; or accepted by faith, as by Whittier, Sy- 
monds, Whitman ; but the healing of the hurt of 
sin, the reparation wrought by victorious good- 
ness, is essential to reconciliation. If for the con- 
sequences of an evil deed there were no remedy, 
if crime had a perpetual triumph, if no compensa- 
tions came to undo sin's terrible effects, then a 
soul might rise to forgiveness, but not to any state 
of mind that could be called reconciliation. Glad 
acquiescence in the experiences of life, or in the 
ways of God, or in an irrevocable past, depends 
upon the actual conquest of evil by the good or 
the perception of that final triumph by the eye 
of faith. Repentance and pardon may restore 
sundered relationships, but something more is 
needed for that peace and joy which are the pro- 
mised rewards of those who have struggled through 
sin to holiness. Reconciliation is forgiveness plus 
that repose of the mind which can only come 



170 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

through an unalterable conviction that evil is 
either restrained or in God's wise providence min- 
isters to a final good. 

The reality of sin, the certainty of retribution, 
the impossibility of forgiveness unless the author- 
ity of the moral law is maintained and the con- 
science satisfied, and the possibility of reconcilia- 
tion when the compensations of the good, either 
realized or seen by faith, overbalance the losses 
inflicted by evil, — these are the fundamental 
teachings of literature. 



II 

POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 



No great writer represents the whole of Christianity in its appli- 
cation to life. But I think that almost every great writer, since the 
religion of Jesus touched the leading races, has helped to reveal some 
new aspect of its beauty, to make clear some new secret of its sweet 
reasonableness, or to enforce some new lesson of its power. — Henry 
van Dyke. 



The cardinal truth of a great reparation in behalf of mankind is 
imbedded in the teachings of the Bible. It has entered as a vital 
element into the Christian experience of the ages ; it pervades the 
hymns and prayers of the church from the apostolic days until now ; 
it is involved essentially in the Eucharist. If history is worth any- 
thing as a witness, the result of discarding this doctrine will be to 
deprive the gospel of the essential element of its power over the con- 
sciences and hearts of men. — George P. Fisher. 



CHAPTER II 

POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 

"When we take the principles which we have 
observed and classified, and apply them to our 
study of the problem of reconciliation between 
God and man, we come immediately upon a very 
interesting and convincing parallelism. It has 
often been charged that the theologians have 
woven their theories of the atonement out of 
distorted views of God, poor exegesis, and mis- 
taken conceptions of the nature of the divine 
government. Doomed by their unnatural origin, 
these dogmas are malformed and unworthy chil- 
dren of the brain, unfit to be domiciled. On the 
contrary, it can be shown that every interpreta- 
tion of the cross which has entered vitally into 
the life of the Christian Church rests upon a prin- 
ciple which has received recognition by some 
world-famous mind in literature. Every great 
theory of the atonement can be matched by a 
story of reconciliation embodied in some drama, 
poem, or work of fiction which has lived because 
in a form of beauty it has presented an elemental 
truth . Over against every prominent expounder of 
the atonement is a poet or a novelist who caught 



174 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the same vision and proclaimed the same essen- 
tial verity. The evidential value of this fact is of 
superlative importance. It proves that the chief 
expositions of reconcilement between God and 
man have come out of the burning heart of hu- 
manity, and are not unwarranted conclusions of 
minds still in the twilight of religious knowledge. 
It proves that widely received and regnant dog- 
mas of the atonement, although encrusted with in- 
adequate ideas of God and false logic, contain an 
important germ of truth upon which men's minds 
instinctively laid hold and were nourished thereby. 

Let us briefly glance at the fundamental agree- 
ments between poets and theologians. The New 
Testament contains no elaborated statements of 
the significance of the work of Christ. It teaches 
the fact of the reconciliation of men to God through 
Christ, and uses bold metaphors to impress the dif- 
ferent aspects of salvation, but the writers stood 
too near the stupendous events and freshly re- 
vealed truths to speculate about their relationship. 

The Patristic doctrine of how Christ saves 
men from sin was an expiatory theory which was 
more fully expounded in the Middle Ages. Along 
with this was developed the strange teaching, 
founded upon the literal interpretation of a New 
Testament metaphor 1 that Christ was given to 
Satan as a ransom. As this conception is not 
based upon an instinct, but upon a misinterpre- 
1 Col. ii, 15 ; Heb. ii, 14. 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 175 

tation of Scripture, we do not find it in the poets. 
It expresses no other truth than that through 
Christ we attain liberty. 

With Anselm's epoch-making book, Cur 
Deus Homo, published in 1098, we have the first 
thorough examination of the necessity demand- 
ing the death of Christ, and an attempted expla- 
nation of the full significance of that tragedy. 
Sin is here set forth as a dishonor inflicted upon 
God, — it is an affront to the divine majesty. 
God's infinite perfections require that the sin be 
punished. The sinner must pay this debt which 
he owes to the divine honor, or suffer the pen- 
alty. He is powerless to cancel his obligation; 
God only can do it. Hence the necessity of a 
God-Man, one who is the gift of God's love, yet 
truly man's representative. The yielding up of 
Christ's life was a free gift, and as this life was 
of more value than all worlds, its voluntary sac- 
rifice was more valuable than sin is heinous, and 
the offering of it rendered due reverence to the 
divine character. 

The idea of sin as a dishonor to the gods was 
a familiar thought to Homer. In the first book 
of the Iliad, the offended Apollo avenges the in- 
sult offered to his priest by sending a pestilence 
upon the Greeks. Sacrifices were made to him 
that honor might atone for the dishonor. What 
in Homer is an uninterpreted instinct is devel- 
oped in iEschylus into a reasoned philosophy 



176 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

very similar to that of Anselm. In the Orestiad, 
Agamemnon violates the sanctity of the home 
by slaying his daughter. The dishonored family 
vindicates itself by the murder of the king. The 
crime is an offense against the state, which asserts 
its rights by the death of Clytemnestra. Sin is 
an affront which demands punishment or homage 
to the offended dignity. Must the destructive re- 
action between family and state go on forever ? 
How can atonement be made ? The answer is 
found in the character, official position, and suf- 
ferings of Orestes ; even as Anselm found his 
solution in the character, nature, and sufferings 
of Christ. Orestes is a righteous man. As he 
has obeyed Apollo, his sufferings are super- 
erogatory. Moreover, he is both the child of 
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and a prince in 
the state. Representing both parties, he can be a 
mediator between them, and his woes, being un- 
merited, give satisfactory honor to all offended 
rights. While the materials and scenery of the 
Greeks differ widely from those used by the 
mediaeval saint, they and he are interpreting the 
same essential instincts and philosophy of life. 

Anselm does not dwell on the extent of the 
Saviour's sufferings nor on his death as a sub- 
stituted penalty, but this conception naturally 
grows out of his thought, and was seized upon 
and elaborated by Aquinas and the Schoolmen. 
They taught that the vicarious work of Christ 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 177 

was the real and absolute equivalent for that 
which the transgressor owes to God and his 
justice. Sin is a debt which Christ and his re- 
deemed pay to the full. The scales balance, and 
perfect justice is done. 

The poet who lends his authority to this 
system of cosmic accuracy is Dante. From his 
temperament his mind naturally gravitated toward 
a philosophy of exact and even-handed justice. 
He is conspicuously the poet of the justice of 
God, and while no writer has excelled him in 
vivid and powerful portrayal of that divine love 
which penetrates all things, yet it is not a law- 
less affection ; always and everywhere it works in 
accordance with strictest and minutest justice. 
Sin, in his conception, is a breach in the moral 
order ; full satisfaction must be made. It wounds 
the character; the scars must be completely 
healed. Christ in his agonies took upon himself 
the eternal penalties of sin. He might have 
"paid it all," so that the penitent would have 
nothing to do but enjoy the benefits of this 
salvation; but this would not have been wise. 
Therefore the souls in purgatory expiate the tem- 
poral consequences of their own sin. " Where 
sin makes void, they fill up for evil pleasures with 
just penalties." 1 The penitent spirit has some- 
thing to do for his own salvation. While by 
baptism he enters into the benefits of Christ's 

1 Paradiso, vii, 82, 84. 



178 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

work for him, he has a satisfaction to render for 
his sins committed after baptism. The purgato- 
rial punishments have a double efficacy; they 
accomplish a satisfaction to the moral order and 
are purifying to the penitent. 

Yet pain is not the only way of cleansing 
the soul and satisfying righteousness. In ante- 
Purgatory Dante asked Virgil how intercessory 
prayer could bend the decree of heaven. The 
reply was : " For the top of judgment veils not 
itself, because a fire of love may, in one instant, 
fulfill that which he who is stationed here must 
satisfy." 1 That is, love can take the place of 
punishment without weakening justice. Prayers 
and the good deeds of the innocent are accepted 
in lieu of the expiatory punishment of the guilty. 

All this seems mediaeval enough, and far re- 
moved from our modern habits of thought. How- 
ever, it has for us great evidential value. A 
theology which has held a commanding position 
in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries, 
winning the cordial assent of many of the best 
minds of Europe, and has been made funda- 
mental in the song of one of the three greatest 
singers of the world, rests upon a sure instinct 
of our natures. That instinct is this : There 
can be no forgiveness where love does not work 
in such a way as to satisfy the strictest demands 
of conscience and meet every requirement of 

1 Purgatorio, vi, 37-59. 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 179 

perfect repentance. Forgiveness is a holy act, 
and it cannot be real unless its holiness is mani- 
fested. 

Many minds in the Middle Ages to whom the 
penal satisfaction ideas of Anselm and Aquinas 
seemed too mechanical found relief in the accep- 
tation theory of Duns Scotus, who held that God 
graciously accepted Christ's sufferings as satis- 
factory. The pains of Calvary were not the 
equivalent of those demanded by a broken law, 
but God received them as sufficient to meet all 
the demands of offended majesty. 

The transition from the severe justice main- 
tained by Aquinas to the equity advocated by 
Duns Scotus is reflected in literature by the 
change from iEschylus to Sophocles. In the lat- 
ter, while the austerity of the moral universe is 
set forth with marvelous power, there is less in- 
sistence upon the idea of blood for blood. The 
sufferings of (Edipus, though due to a violated 
law, are not carefully weighed in a balance, but 
accomplish his purification, and finally win the 
compassion of the gods. This failure to empha- 
size the exactitude of justice may be explained by 
the different story which Sophocles dramatized; 
still the more probable reason is that his tem- 
perate mind was disinclined to trace an equation 
between sin and suffering. 

Another widely influential theory of the atone- 
ment is that originally propounded by Grotius, 



180 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the eminent jurist of the seventeenth century. We 
are subjects, he maintained, under the moral gov- 
ernment of God. A governor can remit the pen- 
alties of the law, provided the end for which the 
punishment was ordained is fulfilled. This end 
is the preservation of the sanctity of the law 
and the prevention of future transgression. The 
death of Christ honors the moral law by reveal- 
ing the heinous nature of sin and God's hatred 
of it. The work of Christ, by maintaining the 
majesty of righteousness and deterring man from 
sin, meets all the ends of the penalty. This con- 
ception is still in much favor both in its form and 
substance. It is also much protested against by 
many as not sufficiently recognizing the funda- 
mental truth that we are children in a Father's 
house rather than subjects of a king. Granting 
that the form of the statement is not in accord- 
ance with our modes of expression, yet a theory 
so influential must have a substratum of truth. 
In the providential government of the universe 
the purpose of penalty appears to be to restrain 
from sin, and to interpret and vindicate the nature 
of things. It cannot be remitted unless in some 
other way the moral order is so interpreted and 
vindicated that man is restrained from transgres- 
sion. There can be no forgiveness in which the 
majesty of the moral law is not upheld. With this 
principle we have grown very familiar in our in- 
vestigation, — it is amply recognized in the great 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 181 

Greek writers. Homer's heroes must show due 
reverence to the gods before the penalties are 
remitted. Orestes honors the Erinnyes before 
they cease their fierce pursuit. Only a god suffer- 
ing vicariously can release Prometheus. CEdipus 
must bear his load of woe that the inviolability 
of the structural laws of the world may be re- 
vealed. The Greek dramatists laid an emphasis 
as insistent and as well considered as that of 
Grotius on the impossibility of remitting punish- 
ment unless the purposes of punishment are met. 
In the working out of their stories Homer and 
iEschylus distinctly recognize the principles for 
which the Dutch theologian contends. 

McLeod Campbell, in his devout and soul-stir- 
ring book entitled " The Nature of the Atone- 
ment/' uttered in theology the truth we hear from 
Hawthorne in literature. Campbell asserted that 
all the demands of a broken law were met either 
by penalty or by repentance. An adequate re- 
pentance of sin and acknowledgment of the divine 
holiness satisfies all the demands of righteous 
government, for goodness is revered, sin detested, 
and both are known in their true nature. Christ, 
as our high priest, took upon his heart a full con- 
sciousness of the sin of the world, and made com- 
plete confession of it before God. Humanity by 
faith enters into the consciousness of Christ, and 
looks upon sin with his abhorrence and upon 
righteousness with his loyalty. The place of con- 



182 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

fession in forgiveness was clearly recognized in 
Dante, who made it one of the three steps to jus- 
tification, while, as we have seen, Hawthorne 
gives it conspicuous recognition. 

The moral influence theory of the atonement 
is greatly in vogue to-day. As we often hear it 
expounded, it amounts to little more than this : 
God, in the life, sufferings, and death of Jesus 
Christ, so revealed his fatherly love and pity that 
men are persuaded to repentance and won to a 
life of rectitude and filial obedience. This makes 
Christ an actor and Calvary a spectacular per- 
formance. The voice both of literature and of 
experience is strongly against any such trifling 
and artificial conception of redemption. In all 
the authors we have studied, the sinner has been 
aroused by a knowledge of the consequences of 
his sin, and not by any vision of the glories of 
righteousness. The penalties of sin check the 
footsteps of the one going in the wrong way ; the 
solicitations of love are effective after the sin 
has become abhorrent. 

Horace Bushnell, who is perhaps the most 
powerful exponent of the so-called "moral in- 
fluence theory," proclaims a much more virile 
and natural doctrine than that ordinarily taught. 
He sought to avoid any such dilutions of his 
teaching as have become current. Christ, he af- 
firms, does more than reveal God's fatherly com- 
passion -, he is " the Moral Power of God upon 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 183 

us ; " " he executes the remission by taking away 
the sin and dispensing the justification of life." 

When our attention is turned toward this 
aspect of forgiveness, we think immediately of 
Bishop Bienvenu in "Les Miserables," conquer- 
ing the vengeful soul of Jean Valjean by the 
subduing force of his goodness. In that celestial 
light the convict sees his fallen nature. Shake- 
speare, in " The Winter's Tale/' but more defi- 
nitely still in " The Tempest," touches upon 
Bushnell's principle. It is the goodness of Pros- 
pero that leads his enemies into a full repentance. 
He makes no dramatic exhibition of superior 
moral endowments ; but the penalties he inflicts 
arouse their consciences, while the greatness of 
his nature tempers their minds to unwonted 
virtue. 

The idea of propitiation has loomed large both 
in sacrificial systems and in theories of the atone- 
ment. The religious thought of the world has 
held that God is justly angry with sin. Before 
there can be abundant pardon this righteous 
indignation must be allayed. From the time the 
first victim was bound on an altar to appease an 
angry god to the publication of Bushnell's able 
work on "Forgiveness and Law," the propiti- 
ation idea has been influential in theology. It 
has also been conspicuous in literature. Propitia- 
tion by the suffering of both injured and injurer 
is strongly emphasized by Hosea, Hawthorne, 



184 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

George Eliot, and Tennyson. It must be noted, 
however, that the propitiation which these au- 
thors portray is nothing legal or mechanical. 
The sufferings of Gomer, Hester Prynne, Ar- 
thur Donnithorne, and Guinevere are propitia- 
tory to the injured because they reveal a new 
attitude of mind to old sins, and disclose a new 
and fairer nature being born out of an alien and 
rejected self. Suffering is demanded by the guilty 
ones themselves as the only suitable expression of 
the new temper of mind, and as an appropriate 
satisfaction to their own aroused feelings. 

We must not press analogies too far, or be 
misled by words, yet I think we are strictly within 
the truth when we affirm that both poets and 
theologians have expressed — the former in the 
beauty of art, and the latter in the clear-cut state- 
ments of dogma — the same elemental principles. 
They agree that forgiveness is no easy matter, — 
a slight favor to be had for the asking*. The con- 
science, which gives an immediate knowledge of 
the reality and grandeur of the ethical structure 
of the universe, and which thus knows sin and 
bears the burden of it, feels the inexorable de- 
mands of justice and cannot be satisfied with any 
forgiveness which ignores in the slightest degree 
the sanctity of the moral law. The warp and woof 
of all pardon, human and divine, must be right- 
eous if forgiveness is to be genuine and perma- 
nent. The theologians have assumed the love of 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 185 

God as the source of forgiveness for sin, but 
they have recognized that his love, however ten- 
der, was holy love. Pardoning mercy must in no 
way dim the lustre of holiness ; it must not im- 
pair the authority of the moral imperatives. The 
religious feeling demands that God be both holy 
and merciful. The holiness in mercy has not 
been conceived as an obstacle to God's forgive- 
ness, but it has been a constant problem to our 
understanding of the divine pardon. Sin and 
holiness must be known in their true nature, that 
forgiveness may be genuine. Anselm, Duns Sco- 
tus, Grotius note the fact that holiness and sin 
are known through suffering, while Campbell 
approaches the same truth by declaring that sin 
and holiness are best revealed in the conscious- 
ness of Christ, and by entering into that con- 
sciousness we are in a condition to be forgiven. 

Many and rich have been the conceptions of 
forgiveness which have sprung from out human- 
ity's needs, but they are all rooted and nourished 
in an instinct of justice. How can the injured 
one be just and merciful at the same time, is 
the age-long problem. When the relationship be- 
tween God and man was the subject of thought, 
the question has been : How can God be just, 
and the justifler of the transgressor? The enigma 
has been approached from different points of 
view. Some have seen the governmental diffi- 
culties, others the necessity of appeasing the in- 



186 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

dignation which divine holiness must feel in the 
presence of sin, others have contemplated the 
difficulties from the standpoint of the offender, 
and shown that the guilty conscience cannot rest 
in a forgiveness that is not holy. Whatever the 
side of the problem touched, whatever the century 
in which the mind took thought of the theme, the 
conclusion was invariable that forgiveness must 
be in strict accord with fundamental righteous- 
ness ; in its very going forth it must reveal the 
blackness of sin and unveil the august majesty of 
holiness. 

The poets have felt the pressure of the same 
inexorable moral world, and have met its prob- 
lems in much the same way. 

The principles we have been discussing all deal 
with the problem of forgiveness ; but reconcilia- 
tion is a word of deeper significance, and covers 
a greater complexity of relations. To what extent 
do literature and theology harmonize in their 
teachings of the ways by which the wounds of 
sin are completely healed? The dogma of the 
atonement is but little discussed among us because 
the men of the past have done their work so well. 
It is a religious commonplace that God is ready 
to forgive, and that in Christ the nature of sin 
and the glories of holiness are so made manifest 
that whosoever is in Christ may be forgiven freely 
without lowering the sanctions of the divine jus- 
tice. The phase of reconciliation which interests 



POETS AND THEOLOGIANS 187 

the modern man is not forgiveness, but adjust- 
ment to the facts of life. His struggle is to 
accept the universe. Reconciliation with life, or 
with God's providential dealings with him, en- 
gages him far more than the forgiveness of his 
sins. 

Sometimes the reconciliation needs to be with 
the past, rather than with the conditions of the 
present. A Lethe for the memory is needed, a 
cleansing of an evil conscience, else life is a per- 
petual torment. Sometimes it is the future, with 
its portents of woe, to which we must adjust our- 
selves. But whether the source of trouble is a 
blackened memory, present misfortune, or future 
dread, reconciliation has always come through a 
faith in a goodness which is in all and over all. 
Dante found every murmur stilled in the beatific 
vision ; Shakespeare trusted to the " soul of good- 
ness in things evil ; " Milton complained not at 
his blindness, because "all is best;" Whitman 
never forgot the luminous hour when he knew 
that " a kelson of the creation is love ; " Whit- 
tier rested in the Eternal Goodness, and had no 
fear. 

This method of reconciliation, as old as Job 
and as recent as Whittier, has always been recog- 
nized in the teachings of the Church. It found 
its crassest expression when the New England 
theologians declared that as the saints look over 
the battlements of heaven upon the damned smok- 



188 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ing in torment their shouts of praise ascend to 
the throne of God ! Their rejoicing is possible 
because through the smoke and the torture they 
behold the glory of the perfect righteousness of 
the Most High. This is but a scenic exaggeration 
of accepted truth. The pulpit has always affirmed 
that the way of peace is the way of submission. 
To accept God's will, to take life on the conditions 
he has assigned, to believe that all things are 
working for good, — this is a familiar teaching, 
yet it has never been made an essential part of 
the doctrine of the atonement. This stone rejected 
of the builders should be very near the head of 
the corner. How important it is we shall see in 
a following chapter. But that (the victorious 
goodness of God/ has a prominent part in any 
tenet of reconciliation would seem to go without 
saying. That faith in the triumph of the divine 
will over all evil is essential to a Christian's 
reconciliation with the facts and forces of life is 
evident. Belief in the soul of goodness in things 
evil which ultimately conquers the evil, brings 
order out of chaos and light out of darkness, and 
makes mistakes, calamities, sins even, minister to 
well-being, — this is fundamental in experience, 
and ever recurring wherever reconciliation is 
touched upon in literature. What is so basic in 
thought and experience is not negligible in a 
gospel of reconciliation. 



Ill 



WHAT DID JESUS OF NAZARETH DO FOR THE 
FORGIVENESS OF OUR SINS ? 



Were the human Conscience, like human Prudence, the mere pro- 
duct of experience ; were it the reflection of the world's opinion ; 
were it given only for our temporal guidance without significance 
beyond ; why should we not get rid of our sins as we do of our mis- 
takes, — commit them and have done with them, — and leave no 
ghost behind ? This is actually the approved wisdom of hard and 
driving men whose ethics are but the instruments of external work. 
But where there is a deeper insight, where the outer doing is looked 
upon as the symbol of the inner being, where affection, character, 
will, have any life and drama of their own, this discharge of old com- 
punctions, this cheerful erasure of bankrupt accounts, is quite im- 
possible. Only when evil is regarded as a transitory mishap, can it 
be thus forgot : once let the consciousness awake that it is disloyalty 
to the Spirit of eternal Holiness, and there is in this a conservative 
power which will forbid its awful shadow to depart. And hence, 
strange as it may seem, it is not the guilty who know the most of 
guilt ; it is the pure, the lofty, the faithful, that are ever haunted by 
the sense of sin, and are compelled by it to throw themselves upon a 
love they never doubt yet cannot claim. . . . Why do you hear from 
a Fenelon words of humiliation that never escape a Richelieu ? why 
are the prayers of prophets and hymns of saintly souls so pathetic in 
their penitence, so full of the plaintive music of baffled aspiration, 
like the cry of some bird with broken wing ? It is because to them 
the truly infinite nature of holiness has revealed itself, and reveals 
itself the more, the higher they rise ; because in its secret breathings 
to their hearts they recognize, not any romance of their own, but the 
communing Spirit of the Living God. . . . But if this be the meaning 
of our sense of sin, what hope, you will say, that it can ever leave 
us ? Was it not the work of Christ to give us rest from the strife 
and sorrows of compunction ? Yes : not, however, a rest within our- 
selves, as if we either ceased from sin or could see it with other or 
less saddened eyes ; but a rest out of ourselves, a pure and perfect 
trust in Him whose spirit draws us from before and whose pity sup- 
ports us from behind. — Martineau. 



CHAPTER III 

WHAT DID JESUS OF NAZARETH DO FOR THE FOR- 
GIVENESS OF OUR SINS ? 

We now draw near the conclusion of our task. 
In the long, and we trust not uninteresting, jour- 
ney we have taken among the masterpieces, we 
have come to the recognition of certain clear 
principles. Forgiveness and reconciliation are 
not unreal or impossible words. Given a disposi- 
tion to pardon on the part of the offended one, 
certain conditions are essential to bring about 
perfect forgiveness : the guilty person must repent 
of his deed, but the repentance cannot be genu- 
ine if the nature of the offense is not adequately 
known. Contrition which has no clear apprehen- 
sion of the nature of the deed done is no contri- 
tion at all. Not only must the criminal recognize 
the real nature of his fault, but he can have no 
sense of full forgiveness unless he is convinced 
that the one who grants the mercy does so with 
a knowledge of what the sin is and all that is 
involved in it. An adequate understanding of the 
offense forgiven, both by the offender and the 
offended, is indispensable to a thorough-going 
and satisfactory forgiveness. But the pardoning 



192 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

transaction takes place in a moral world which suf- 
fers no infringement of its solemn laws. Forgive- 
ness must not only be merciful, it must be just. 
This principle looms up with commanding im- 
pressiveness in every great drama and work of 
fiction. Of unquestioned authority in literature, 
it has been equally conspicuous in theology. The 
burden resting upon the mind of every prominent 
interpreter of the atonement has been to show 
that God is just while justifying the sinner. The 
majesty of the moral law must not be diminished 
or its splendor dimmed by any act of mercy. 

The necessity of not in any way rending the 
fabric of ethical obligation by the going forth 
of forgiveness is further emphasized by the fact 
that sin is recognized through an aroused con- 
science. The moral sense, once awakened, can- 
not be allayed by any method which comes short 
of satisfying its insistent demands. Forgiveness^ 
must be in harmony with the moral sentiments, 
or it is not forgiveness. 

But forgiveness is not reconciliation. The lat- 
ter is a far more comprehensive word. Complete 
reconciliation we have learned is impossible unless 
both the injured and the injurer see that good 
has come out of the evil done, or else have so 
strong a faith in an overruling Providence as to 
believe that the evil is caught up into God's re- 
demptive purpose and will be made to serve his 
ends. 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 193 

With these definite principles clearly in mind, 
we are prepared to ask the question : " How are 
men reconciled to God in Jesus Christ ? " To 
follow the line of cleavage already traced we 
shall first inquire : " What did Jesus of Nazareth 
do for the forgiveness of our sins ? " We shall 
then be prepared to press the further interroga- 
tion, " How are men reconciled to God through 
him?" 

No sooner had Jesus ended his earthly life, 
and the belief in his resurrection taken possession 
of his disciples, than they began to preach remis- 
sion of sins in his name. It was first proclaimed 
at Pentecost, and was a conspicuous message of 
the apostolic church. The Christ had died, and 
the reason he had submitted unto death was that 
repentance and remission of sins might be preached 
in his name. That ancient gospel is true. It has 
been attested by the experience of twenty cen- 
turies. It has been certified in many millions of 
lives. Whoever has come within the circle of. 
Jesus' influence, and yielded to the spell of his 
personality, has felt the burden of his sin roll 
away. He has been saved both from the love of f 
sin and from the power of sin ; he has been pro- 
foundly convinced that God has forgiven him, 
and that he has come into a condition of unim- 
peded filial relationship. " His name shall be 
called Jesus," say the Scriptures, " for he shall 
save his people from their sins." His name is 



194 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

still called Jesus, because lie does save his people 
from their sins. 

When we analyze what the historical Jesus of 
Nazareth has done either to assure us of forgive- 
ness of our sins, or to procure that forgiveness 
for us, his work resolves itself into the following 
achievements : — 

(1) He aroused and deepened men's conscious- 
ness of God's moral character. 

He did not reveal to them the existence of 
God. That had long been the fundamental ar- 
ticle of the creeds. He did not declare God's 
nearness. In words of unsurpassed power the 
Psalmist had exclaimed : " Whither shall I go 
from thy spirit ? or whither shall I flee from thy 
presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art 
there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art 
there. If I take the wings of the morning and 
dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; even 
there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right 
hand shall hold me." He was not the first to 
disclose the divine compassion. Centuries be- 
fore his day the Psalmist had also declared: 
"Like as a father pitieth his children, so the 
Lord pitieth them that fear him." He did not 
first unfold the awful holiness of the Most High. 
"Be ye holy, for I am holy," was the structural 
thought of the Jewish law. What did Jesus do ? 
He lived a life so unique in purity, power, and 
beauty that he intensified and made clear, just, 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 195 

and compelling our sense of the character of 
God. 

A man must needs build his house out of the 
material he has at his command. The Esquimau 
within the Arctic Circle constructs his home of 
snow and ice ; the dweller in tropic lands employs 
the bamboo and palm tree. Each utilizes the 
material nature has given him knowledge of and 
power over. In the same way do we rear the 
structures in which our minds rest. We cannot put 
anything into our mental concepts which has not 
come into the circle of our consciousness. We 
build our thoughts and ideals out of the facts 
of experience. After Jesus of Nazareth had lived 
his life, a new and stupendous fact had come into 
human experience, — a new sense of God, a fresh 
and august conception of holiness, an impressive 
realization of the virility and beauty of compas- 
sion. This startling and luminous fact led men's 
minds upward. It clarified, enriched, enthroned 
their knowledge of God. Hitherto men had 
known God as he was disclosed in the energy 
and grandeur of nature. They understood him 
better as he was revealed in the person and words 
of his prophets, for the processes of history 
declare the moral attributes of the Eternal more 
clearly than the processes of nature. God mani- 
fests himself more fully in the spiritual nature 
of man than in the material world. The hu- 
man soul is a higher revelation of God than the 



196 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

mountains or the stars. Humanity at its best 
is certainly God's highest possible revelation of 
himself, and man at his best is Jesus Christ. 
Those who come within the circle of Christ's in- 
fluence by the spontaneous action of their minds 
must think of God through the light which he 
brings into their thoughts. What Jesus was in 
pity, sympathy, righteousness, serves to interpret 
what God is in his essential nature. The splen- 
dor of the qualities which the Master revealed on 
Calvary men must believe to be the outshining 
of the nature of the Most High. Humanity gets 
its most exalted notion of Deity through man 
at his best, and especially through the loftiest 
moments of the best man. Hence it is that on 
Calvary men have found the material out of which 
they have constructed their noblest thought of 
God. Or, in other words, it is by this method 
that God has made the supreme revelation of 
himself. The loftiest moments of the supreme 
man afford the most intimate knowledge of the 
heart of the Everlasting. 

Having once known Jesus, men can no longer 
think of God as a relentless monarch, unforgiv- 
ing unless propitiated by an holocaust of victims. 
They must enter into Jesus' consciousness of a 
Father who so loves the world that he sends his 
only begotten Son to redeem it. He loves men, 
not because they are noble and worthy, but be- 
cause he is God ! and it is the very glory of God 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 197 

to love men in their sins that he may save them 
from the bondage of evil. He is not an outraged 
Being who waits in sullen anger for the prodigal 
to return and allay his wrath, but he is a Father 
watching in solicitous love for the wanderers to 
come home. Like a good shepherd, he seeks the 
one who has gone astray, even at cost to himself ; 
like the housewife, searching every nook and 
corner for a piece of silver, he searches for the 
lost ; he stands at the door and knocks ; he com- 
pels the outcasts to come to the feast. This is 
the nature of Jesus ; it is also the nature of God, 
for the Son doeth whatsoever he seeth the Father 
do. 

After this revelation in Jesus Christ, all no- 
tions of teasing God into an attitude of for- 
giveness by prayers, or sacrifices, or elaborate 
ceremonial, must vanish from Christian thought. 
It is God who makes the offering ; it is God 
who presents the sacrifices; it is God who soli- 
cits men. After Jesus' sacrificial life and death 
religious thought must assume as its fundamen- 
tal postulate the good will of God toward men. 
It is he who takes the initiative in the atonement, 
and not man. Indeed, so firmly established did 
the idea become, that the grimmest theologian 
took it for granted. Behind the bloodiest and 
most austere theories of penal satisfaction or 
legal substitution was the presupposition that it 
was God who opened the way and provided the 



198 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

means of atonement. Calvin quotes these words of 
JLugustine with entire approval : " God did not 
/ begin to love us when we were reconciled to him 
by the blood of his Son ; but he loved us before 
the creation of the world, that we might be his 
children, together with his only begotten Son, 
even before we had any existence. Therefore 
our reconciliation by the death of Christ must 
not be understood as if he reconciled us to God 
that God might begin to love those whom he 
had before hated ; but we are reconciled to him 
who already loved us and with whom we were at 
enmity on account of sin." 1 In another place 
Augustine writes : " Unless the Father had been 
already appeased, would he have delivered up his 
own Son, not sparing him for us? But I see 
that the Father loved us also before, not only 
before the Son died for us, but before he created 
the world." 2 

The older theologians are often accused of 
representing Christ as creating good will in God 
toward men. The only ground for such charges 
lies in the artificial way in which they present 
Christ as upholding the divine justice in forgive- 
ness. They placed the emphasis on the work of 
Christ in removing the obstacles to forgiveness ; 
but they assumed a good will in God eager to 

1 Institutes, bk. 11, ch. xvi. 

2 Quoted by Professor Stevens in The Christian Doctrine of 
Salvation, p. 428. 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 199 

find a channel of communication for itself, no 
matter how stupendous the cost. 

When, therefore, we ask what Jesus of Naza- 
reth did for forgiveness, we may assert unhesi- 
tatingly that he convinced men of God's readi- 
ness to forgive. 

(2) He also quickened and intensified human- 
ity's sense of sinfulness. 

We do not realize how soiled a garment is 
until it is compared with one that is stainless. 
We learn how crooked a stick is when it is placed 
by the side of one absolutely straight. It is 
the most brilliant light which casts the deepest 
shadow. When the Light of the World came, 
then men saw in most definite outline the shadow 
resting upon humanity. The contrast between 
his perfect rectitude and their distorted lives 
made them painfully aware how unseemly their 
characters were. His spotless purity startlingly 
revealed their sin-stains. That the Athenians 
could not tolerate the best man who ever walked 
their streets — but compelled Socrates to drink 
the hemlock — is the most searching insight 
one can get into the infirmities of the Greek 
character. That Jesus of Nazareth, humanity at 
its best, could live only three years of public life 
in Palestine is the clearest revelation possible of 
the perversion of the moral sense of his genera- 
tion ; and the conviction that if he had come to 
any other generation or country his fate would 



200 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

have been substantially the same gives to us our 
most impressive illustration of the sinfulness of 
human nature. 

That the coming of Jesus Christ into the 
world has deepened men's consciousness of the 
exceeding sinfulness of sin there can be no doubt. 
It is seen in a more sober view of life; in the 
penitential note of our hymns ; in the aspirations 
embodied in architecture ; in the exertions of 
philanthropists to save men from evil. Sin is 
made known only by contrast. When all is dark, 
a shadow is not seen. Jesus in revealing the 
splendor of righteousness made manifest the na- 
ture of sin. His holiness was itself the severest 
condemnation of sin and a vindication of the 
divine character. 

Jesus upheld the sanctions of the moral world 
and at the same time condemned sin by his words. 
When he spoke of God it was as the Holy Fa- 
ther. The first petition of his prayer was, " Hal- 
lowed be thy name/' indicating that the primary 
desire of his life was that the divine holiness 
might be perceived and honored. His words 
against militant iniquity were as hot, terrible, 
and unsparing as a bolt of lightning. Sin is so 
horrible a thing that rather than commit it one 
is to cut off his hand or pluck out his eye. It is 
better to die than to give offense. By every word 
of his mouth Jesus exalted righteousness and 
denounced unrighteousness. 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORCxIVENESS 201 

By his actions he condemned sin. He came 
into the world to save men from it. All his per- 
suasions were to induce men to leave it. The pur- 
pose of his life was to win a victory over it. He 
obeyed God's holy law, he honored it by follow- 
ing it implicitly, and rather than be disobedient, 
he went to his death. God's will must be done, 
however costly the sacrifice required. The entire 
life of Jesus, as it is recorded in the Gospels, is 
an ever-increasing revelation of the authority and 
glory of righteousness and of God's hatred of un- 
righteousness. 

But it is chiefly in the consciousness of the 
Master that we see the unveiling of iniquity and 
behold it in its naked ugliness. He who would 
be the mediator between God and man in the 
supreme transaction of forgiveness must know 
what sin is in all its hideousness ; he must feel 
its sickening and utter wretchedness ; he must 
appreciate to the full its relentless malignity. He 
who would make an atonement for sin must real- 
ize the sin in the height of its pride and in the 
depth of its woe ; he must feel its burden upon 
his own soul. How else can he reveal it ade- 
quately to men ? In what other way can he make 
men feel that his work is genuine? Hence it is 
that we find in the sorrow Jesus felt in the pre- 
sence of sin the most impressive revelation of the 
character of evil. v — ^ 

The reader will remember that Milton, in his 



202 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

delineation of sin, described it at first in its heroic 
aspects. Satan was an archangel in form and 
power. He elicits our admiration as he chal- 
lenges the supremacy of heaven's Eternal King. 
As he continues in evil he loses his glory, be- 
comes more cunning, reptilian, loathsome, until 
finally he and all his followers are changed 
into serpents greedily devouring illusions. Thus 
does the poet describe the career of sin from its 
pride to its despicableness, from its glory to its 
shame. 

Jesus encountered sin in all of these aspects. 
He first met it in a mighty battle for vast issues. 
In the wilderness he was tempted by the Prince 
of this world, and the wager was a world-wide 
and age-long empire. It was a contest with colos- 
sal powers for imperial results. As he lived more 
deeply into the world's evil, sin changed its form ; 
it expressed itself in the craft of the Pharisee, 
the fickleness of the people, the treachery of 
friends, and the viperous cunning of the priests. 
Judas, and not the great hierarch of darkness, is 
the type of evil. The Christ goes more deeply 
yet, even to the bottom of the abyss, and knows 
sin in its most dismal woe, feeling the utter hor- 
ror and God-forsakenness of it. The agony of 
Gethsemane was not the penal infliction which 
an indignant God visited upon him, neither was 
it a legal condemnation which he bore. It was 
the Holy One feeling the weight of the world's 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 203 

sin upon his own pure soul. The realization of 
its pitiless malignity, its sullen ingratitude, its 
sterile wretchedness, swept over him like a flood. 
It was more than a consciousness of the sins of 
the priests, the baseness of Judas, the dullness of 
his disciples ; it was a sense of the world's in- 
iquity, of the depths of humanity's degradation, 
of the enormity of it all in the sight of God. No 
wonder that he sweat great drops of blood as in 
the white light of his own holiness he entered 
into the vastness and the sickening horror of the 
world's transgressions. Again upon the cross a 
black cloud drifted up from the abyss, and as the 
dripping gloom and biting darkness encompassed 
him, he tasted sin's utter godlessness. 

The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us 
that Jesus tasted death for every man, and Paul 
adds that the sting of death is sin. The bitter- 
ness of the cup which the Father would not take 
from the lips of his Son was not the pains of 
death ; it was a consciousness of the sin of the 
world, — a perception of what sin means to God, 
and of what it is in its essential nature. 

It is by this knowledge that the righteous ser- 
vant justifies many. By his knowledge of our 
guilt he becomes our High Priest, our Interpre- 
ter. He interprets the holiness of God and the 
needs of man. Whoever now comes to Christ 
in faith knows his sin as he never knew it before; 
he perceives its deformity and guilt, he learns to 



204 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

look upon it as God looks upon it. He hates it 
and turns from it. He also sees by our Lord's 
words, by the purpose of his life, and especially 
by his sufferings in the presence of sin and under 
its weight, the ineffable holiness of God. Man 
never would have felt that his sins were forgiven, 
had he not seen in all the activities and feelings 
of Jesus an adequate consciousness of the essen- 
tial nature of human guilt. But this clear con- 
sciousness is seen in all Christ's actions from the 
manger to the cross. In the fine words of Mar- 
tineau : " The humility of Christ betrays a mind 
profoundly impressed with a sense of evil and 
the universality of sin. Beginning with the call 
to repentance, and expiring with the prayer of 
forgiveness, he seems never to have quitted the 
presence of human guilt, and everywhere to have 
fixed upon it the same full, clear, unconscious 
look, divinely earnest and divinely sad." 

Trusting in God's readiness to forgive, as 
attested by our Lord's consciousness of divine 
Fatherhood, knowing the truth about sin by his 
words, his life, and his sufferings, beholding 
the holiness of the Father in his character and 
his obedience, the sinful soul can believe itself 
forgiven. It knows God's mercy, it knows his 
holiness, it knows the character of sin. 

It is not infrequently affirmed that the revela- 
tion of the character of God which Jesus made 
is the chief power in leading men to repentance. 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 205 

This assertion is not borne out by our investi- 
gation. Both in literature and in life the fell re- 
sults of wrong-doing first awaken the slumbering 
soul and turn its steps toward righteousness. 
When it faces in a new direction, and con- 
fronts a fresh light, the sense of personal guilt 
increases, and repentance is perfected ; but peni- 
tence is seldom originated by the sight of the 
greatness of love. 

Taking this idea into the realm of faith, we 
shall find, if I mistake not, that most men who are 
living sinful lives either do not hear the preaching 
of the love of God in Jesus Christ, or, if they 
hear, are but little impressed. While their wills 
are centred upon other things it is impossible for 
them to have any compelling realization of either 
the compassion of God or what sin costs him. 
Their perception of all the divine realities is dim. 
The forces which will stir them to repentance are 
the pains of violated law, the retributions which 
follow evil courses. The soul thus quickened may 
behold God's mercy as made known in Jesus, and 
begin a holy life. Then the knowledge of what 
sin meant to Jesus will enkindle a sense of guilt 
and make repentance complete. In the forgive- 
ness of sin it is the work of the Spirit to convict 
of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment ; it is 
the work of the historical Jesus of Nazareth to 
make repentance perfect by deepening the sense 
of personal unworthiness, and to bring home to 



206 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the penitent the wickedness of sin, and the right- 
eousness and mercy of God. 

It is difficult accurately to distinguish, even 
in thought, between the work of the historical 
Jesus in forgiveness and that of the Eternal 
Christ. This we are endeavoring to do, even 
though imperfectly, in order to make more salient 
the truths to be touched upon in the next chap- 
ter. The fact to which we are about to call at- 
tention involves both the work of Jesus and of 
the Eternal Spirit. Coming within the circle of 
light which streams from Jesus of Nazareth, in 
its solemn glory a contrite man sees himself as 
he is, and beholds the holiness and gentleness of 
God. Entering into the consciousness of Jesus, 
he knows himself forgiven. All the conditions 
of forgiveness are there. 

But the soul is an absorbent. It is easily 
saturated with the personal influence of another. 
Coming thus near to Jesus in faith, the penitent 
puts on our Lord's character, he becomes a new 
creature, he is saved both from the love of sin 
and the power of sin ; he is redeemed by the di- 
vine energy. This transforming process gives him 
another assurance of forgiveness. He perceives 
that with this new attitude of mind, standing 
within the play of redemptive force, he will attain 
to the Master's likeness. He is united to one who 
will perfect him in all holiness. Thus his faith 
becomes prophetic of righteousness; it is essen- 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 207 

tial righteousness. His faith, to use Paul's legal 
phraseology, takes away all judicial condemnation, 
and puts him in the relationship to God of a son. 
He becomes one with God in character. 

How does the historical Jesus of Nazareth 
mediate our forgiveness ? 

(1) He reveals and makes effective God's eager- 
ness to forgive and reconcile us unto himself. 
Jesus did not make God willing to forgive, but 
he manifested that forgiveness. 

(2) By his words, the sacrifice of his life, and 
his spiritual consciousness he discloses the essen- 
tial wickedness of sin and the divine condemna- 
tion of it ; and thus makes known and exalted the 
holiness of God. 

(3) Whenever any one turns to Jesus in peni- 
tence, he is brought into such an attitude of mind 
toward sin, and has formed within him such a 
sense of the worth of righteousness, that genu- 
ine forgiveness is possible. 

Jesus does something for us which we could not 
do for ourselves. He declares to us how God looks 
upon sin. He unveils the sanctity of the moral 
world. He makes it possible for God fully to 
pardon us. Many writers on the atonement object 
to the statement that Jesus removed any obstacle 
to our forgiveness. But surely there are certain 
conditions to be fulfilled before forgiveness can 
flow from God to man. For these conditions the 
work of Jesus provided. He set forth the chief 



208 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

factors which enter into pardon — love, holiness, 
sin — in their true nature. He wrought a work in 
our interest, — a work, as it were, outside of us, 
without which God could not consistently have 
forgiven us. 

(4) Jesus of Nazareth does something in us, as 
well as for us. We have a right thus to distin- 
guish in Christian experience, and it helps to clear- 
ness of thought. When we come into the circle 
of his light he impresses himself upon us, we are 
clothed with his character, we are changed into 
his likeness. In him we achieve oneness with 
God. 

If it be objected that the cross has not been 
given its Scriptural prominence in this interpre- 
tation of the work of him who hung upon it, the 
reply is that in the mind of the writer the cross 
is not something to be considered apart from the 
life and spiritual consciousness of Jesus. Kather 
it is the focus of all the truths and forces we have 
been considering. It was at the cross that the 
divine love made its consummate revelation. It 
was at the cross that the divine holiness flashed 
forth in most awful light. It was at the cross that 
the degradation and malignity of sin reached its 
most damning manifestation. 

The cross is the symbol of Christianity, and 
the doctrine of the death of the Christ the heart 
of the gospel, not because it contains something 
separable in nature from the other forms of our 



JESUS OF NAZARETH AND FORGIVENESS 209 

Lord's activity, but because these were there sym- 
bolized with dramatic intensity. The sacrificial 
death of Jesus was not the work he accom- 
plished, it was the via dolorosa along which he 
toiled in fulfillment of his task. Love can reveal 
itself to the utmost only by the complete surren- 
der of life. The cross grew out of the wrath of 
man and the necessity for infinite love to reveal 
itself in the most unmistakable way. The spot 
where the fullness of love meets the supreme vir- 
ulence of sin must be marked by a cross. 

If this interpretation of the work of Jesus 
seems inadequate to any reader who has followed 
me thus far, I hope his patience will endure 
through the next chapter, where perhaps he will 
find recognized and treated what he has here 
missed. 



IV 

WHAT DOES THE ETERNAL CHRIST DO FOR OUR 
RECONCILIATION? 



The Eternal Spirit has his task in the revelation of the mind and 
heart of God to mankind, and only God, operating through the entire 
term of history, can achieve God's work. — George A. Gordon. 

For if the hlood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprink- 
ling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the 
flesh : how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the 
eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your 
conscience from dead works to serve the living God ? — Epistle to 
the Hebrews. 



CHAPTER IV 

WHAT DOES THE ETERNAL CHRIST DO FOR OUR 
RECONCILIATION ? 

Even though forgiveness is complete, there are 
limits beyond which it cannot go. It cannot undo 
the fact of sin. It cannot efface the memory of 
evil done. It cannot hold in leash the conse- 
quences of wrong which are now spreading their 
destruction. It cannot quench the fires of remorse 
or stifle regret. Evidently a believer is not saved 
until he is purged from an evil conscience and 
his memory is cleansed. The atonement as thus 
far discussed simply shows how the will is made 
accordant with the divine purpose, and the heart 
returns an answering affection for a love that 
has been freely poured out in its behalf. If theT 
believer were an isolated individual, bound by 
relationships only to the Almighty Father, a dis- 
cussion of the atonement need go no further than 
to show how the prodigal is brought home again 
and is made a partaker of the Father's bounty. 
Beyond this partial salvation for the individual 
few interpretations of the atonement go. After 
reading many books on all phases of the subject, 
I do not recall a single modern treatise which 



214 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

carries the discussion beyond the forgiveness and 
healing of the individual. This would be suffi- 
cient, perchance, if the single soul, in being re- 
deemed, were deprived of memory ; if salvation 
blotted out all his recollections of the guilty past; 
or else so encased him in selfishness that the con- 
sequences of his evil deeds in the lives of others 
were to him a matter of no concern. But in 
Christian experience just the contrary is true. 
The nearer one approaches the splendor of the 
Eternal Light, the blacker do the sins of the past 
life appear. The more one enters into the mind 
of Christ, the greater is his concern for those 
whom he has wronged. He thinks less of personal 
bliss, and becomes more solicitous for those whom 
his evil actions have injured. The omission to 
study the problem of reconciliation in the light 
of man's relationship to his fellows, as well as in 
the light of his relationship to God, is all the more 
inexplicable because one of the pronounced char- 
acteristics of modern life is its social conscious- 
ness. Never was the feeling of human brother- 
hood stronger ; never did men more thoroughly 
understand the principle that none liveth to 
himself and none dieth to himself ; never has the 
assertion been more positive that the individual 
cannot be saved alone ; never has less atten- 
tion been paid to legal, governmental, expiatory 
aspects of the atonement ; never has so much 
thought been given to the interpretation of reli- 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 215 

gious truth in the light of man's recognized 
spiritual needs. Yet no recent writer on the 
atonement has ever lifted his eyes from the in- 
dividual transgressor. Apparently these modern 
theologians find nothing in the one man to be re- 
generated but the heart and will. They have no 
word about the memory. One searches in vain 
for a single reflection on the possibility of dwell- 
ing in the glory of the presence of God with the 
recollection of an unholy past. One might infer 
from reading the latest books on the subject that 
when a man repents of his sins and turns from 
them he is freed from all responsibility for those 
he has wronged, and that in rapturous bliss 
and utter forgetfulness he enters into the peace 
of perfect reconciliation. The older theologians, 
whom we so often charge with preaching an 
individualistic gospel, had in their minds a very 
distinct notion of the sin of the world. It was 
an entity which must be met and settled with ; 
and to the best of their ability, and according to 
their light, they showed how Christ's suffering 
on the cross balanced the world's iniquity. Our 
newer religious thinking starts with the assump- 
tion of the closeness of man's relations to his 
fellows ; it analyzes and proclaims the social con- 
sciousness; and yet there probably was never a 
time in the history of religious thought when 
the atonement has been discussed in a way so 
baldly individualistic. 



216 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

How much greater the problem of reconcili- 
ation is than recent writers have recognized is 
made clear by a simple illustration. The parable 
of the Prodigal Son is often quoted as an ex- 
ample of the simplicity of the gospel. It is a 
beautiful setting forth of the truth of God's 
readiness to pardon, but it does not pretend to 
embody the whole process of reconciliation. Like 
most parables, it expounds only a phase of truth. 
Let us suppose that the prodigal has a younger 
brother whom he takes with him from his father's 
home, leading the boy into the dens of vice and 
teaching him the ways of debauchery. By and 
by the prodigal comes to himself and says, " I 
will arise and go to my father," and, as we know, 
he is received with joy and eager forgiveness. 
The lad, however, who was so easily enticed into 
sin is not so readily induced to forsake it. He 
stubbornly refuses to return with the prodigal, 
and goes into deeper and more perverse iniquity. 
Is the prodigal comfortable in his new robe and 
jeweled ring, amid the merriment of the ban- 
quet? Will not the memory of his brother, 
whom his own willfulness has led astray, shadow 
his heart and make perfect peace impossible ? 
And the father, while he may have freely for- 
given the prodigal, can he be perfectly recon- 
ciled to him so long as the lad is out in the dark- 
ness ? There is no peace for the prodigal until 
there is an atonement for his memory. His fa- 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 217 

tlier may forgive him, but he cannot forgive him- 
self. He is not redeemed from his sin while the 
guilt of it, or the shadow of the guilt, lies on his 
conscience. The father also, who loves the lad 
equally with the prodigal, cannot contemplate the 
latter with perfect complacency in unequivocal 
reconciliation so long as the consequences of the 
prodigal's insubordination are visited upon the 
younger boy. The supreme purpose of his life 
as a father has been thwarted. He may school 
himself to submit to a fate which has broken 
and disappointed his life, but if he sees no fur- 
ther than the wrecking of his hopes, he has 
no profound blessedness. Both will leave their 
home and search for the wanderer, and do 
all for him that compassionate love can sug- 
gest and human power carry out. Either the 
lad will be brought again to his home, saved 
through his hard experience, inflexibly dedicated 
to virtue because his eyes have been opened to the 
nature of sin, and made more appreciative of his 
father's love by his sojourn in the wilderness ; 
or, in some way which we cannot well imagine, 
it will be made apparent to both father and son 
that out of the evil greater good has come, and 
that the wrath of man has wrought eternal praise 
to God. In the light of this vision, or in the joy 
of the actual redemption of the lost one, per- 
fect reconciliation is possible. Then the fires of 
remorse are quenched, the memory is cleansed 



218 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

of its dead weight, the conscience is at peace with 
itself, and the supreme purpose of life is seen to 
be fulfilled, not blighted. 1 

We venture another pertinent illustration to 
enforce this truth. We may imagine that after 
Jacob's sons had sold their brother into Egypt, 
they repented and confessed their fault, and the 
old patriarch forgives them ; but forgiveness, even 
though genuine, would have come far short of 
reconciliation. Complacency of mind, the joy of 
unshadowed union with his sons, is impossible 
while the thought remains of his younger son 
toiling in slavery and perhaps hopelessly crippled 
in his mental and moral nature. The reconcilia- 
tion of Jacob to his sons is dependent on whether 
or not Joseph is hopelessly lost. When, however, 
he sees that evil has been made in God's wise 
providence to work good, then an abundant and 
unreserved accord is possible with those who have 
wronged him. Judah and his brethren, by the 
same knowledge, are enabled to be reconciled to 
their past. 

The horror of sin is its contagious nature. The 
pestilence passes from the diseased one into the 
community. It is unconfined. A wrong commit- 
ted sends its waves of destruction rolling on in 
ever widening circles and with accumulated power 

1 The responsibility of the younger brother for his own sin 
does not entirely free the prodigal, and it is his reconciliation 
we are considering. 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 219 

to the ends of the earth, overwhelming guilty 
and innocent, and working havoc down through 
the generations. A gospel of the atonement is 
singularly parochial which covers only the rela- 
tions of the individual with God. If the blight 
of sin never passed beyond the evil-doer, then 
the killing of the love and power of it in the 
individual by genuine contrition, and a return 
to a God solicitous to forgive, would be the easy 
solution of the whole matter. But the dreadful 
characteristic of sin is that its effects are vis- 
ited upon others. No man liveth, or sinneth, to 
himself. He drags others with him into the pit. 
The believer cannot escape from his deeds as the 
butterfly from its cocoon. There are accounts to 
be settled and amends to be made. A gospel 
which tells the perpetrator how to escape from 
the murky stream of iniquity where his victims 
are still struggling, and promises to make him 
stand in Zion and before God in rapturous joy, 
with no smoking mount of horror in his memory, 
is anaemic in the extreme. "Son, remember," 
were the solemn words which Abraham spoke to 
Dives in torment. It is because we must remem- 
ber that we need an atonement which deals not 
only with the love and power of sin in our 
wills and hearts, but with the evil which has 
gone out from our infirmity and perversity into 
the world. The difficulty of conquering sin in 
the individual is great, but greater is the need of 



220 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

checking the results of sin as it moves on in its 
destructive course. Most explanations of the 
atonement go no further than to make plain the 
method by which the root of sin is destroyed in 
the individual heart. But this is the smaller part 
of the problem. When one repents of sin, he 
does not lightly shake off his responsibility for 
its effects upon others. He cannot in the eyes 
of men, — certainly he cannot in the sight of 
God. It is he who has done this evil. It is he 
who launched it into the world, and it is he who 
must bear the guilt of it. In the foregoing 
chapter we insisted strongly that there could 
be no genuine repentance or pardon without 
adequate knowledge of the sanctity of moral 
obligation and the hideousness of sin. In this 
chapter we would contend just as emphatically 
that there can be no reconciliation without either 
a knowledge of how the dreadful effects of sin 
are caught up in some providential way and 
made to subserve a good purpose, or an unques- 
tioning faith that in the goodness of God this 
will be done. 

The Buddhists have a doctrine of Karma. It 
means the sum total of a man's life, his thoughts, 
deeds, influence. It is the result of a person's 
existence taken as a whole. It includes what he 
is and what he has done. It is the net product 
of his being and activity. 

Every treatment of the atonement which con- 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 221 

siders man apart from Karma, which declares him 
saved while paying no attention to the aggre- 
gate of his life, is painfully lame and unsatisfac- 
tory. To any earnest man who thinks of some- 
thing more than the salvation of his own soul, 
and wishes to undo his mistakes and make good 
nny wrong he may have committed, the foremost 
desire is to be assured that God in Christ pro- 
vides for the evil that has gone out from him. 
He wants to know that there is a salvation com- 
prehensive enough to embrace both himself and 
all the effects of his life. The more unselfish he 
becomes, the more concerned will he be about 
the divine provisions for the injury he has 
wrought in the world. He will care more for 
this than for his personal blessedness. Not m erely 
the eradication of personal sin, but the cure of 
cosmical evil is included in a gospel of reconcili- 
ation, and a reasoned and sufficient faith in the 
latter is as indispensable as the experience of the 
other to the final peace of a redeemed soul. A 
sinner needs more than forgiveness. He is not 
saved until some vision or experience of God's 
grace reconciles him to the total results of his life. 
The spiritual need of every believer either to 
see distinctly the dire effects of his mistakes and 
transgressions overcome by the good that is in 
the world, or by faith to enter into the ultimate 
triumph of the " deep things of God " over the 
"deep things of Satan," is abundantly certified 



<L 



222 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

by the authors we have investigated. Dante en- 
tered into the peace of perfect reconciliation when 
in the Fountain of Living Light he saw what is 
imperfect here made perfect there, all things being 
bound with love in one volume. Milton shows 
that Adam after his transgression was not chiefly 
solicitous about his personal salvation* The hor- 
ror of his deed was the woe entailed upon the 
unborn generations. He was not so slight a 
creature as to be absorbed in the thought of 
seeking salvation for his own soul. The com- 
manding article in his reconciliation will be the 
knowledge of how through his sin grace has 
much more abounded. His abject despair is 
changed to rapturous joy as Michael unfolds to 
his astonished mind the glories of God's re- 
demption through Christ. The final triumph of 
the Infinite Goodness, which he appropriates by 
faith, is the ground of his reconciliation with 
his past. The sons of Jacob, if they ever truly 
repented of the crime of selling Joseph into sla- 
very, were outside the gates of joy, and under 
the shadow of a tormenting memory, until they 
knew that God, working through their crime, 
had accomplished good. 

Sometimes the same problem presents a dif- 
ferent aspect. We need a reconcilement with life 
as we experience it. The innocent, suffering from 
the follies and perversity of the wicked, cry out 
for an explanation of the providential order of 



FT 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 223 

the world. This is the agony of Job. Stripped of 
his possessions and all that made life endurable, 
he is tempted to curse life as he sees it. His peace 
comes when he can say, " Now mine eye seeth 
thee." The writer of the Seventeenth Psalm will 
be satisfied when he beholds God's likeness. Mil- 
ton acquiesces in his blindness because by waiting 
in the darkness he understands that he is serving. 
Whittier can look with serene mind on a world 
tormented by evil because by spiritual prescience 
he sees- 

The patience of immortal love 
Outwearing mortal sin." / 

He rebels not at the evil which comes to his lot, 
for he is 

" Assured alone that life and death 
His mercy underlies." 

"After all," says Phillips Brooks, "for every 
trouble and doubt in life, except those which 
come directly from our own sinfulness, the only 
consolation which we really need is explanation." 
There are occasions when we can perceive a defi- 
nite explanation for a given infliction ; then we 
acquiesce. More often the trial is so woven into 
the fabric of the providential order that a spe- 
cific elucidation is impossible ; then, like Job, we 
receive, instead of an explanation, a conviction of 
the righteousness and goodness of God, and this 
suffices for our peace. When the evils " come 
directly from our own sinfulness," we need the 
same consolation. Either we know that the 



224 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

wrong committed works good, as in the case of 
Joseph ; or by faith we rest in the assurance that 
God will make the wrath of man to praise him. 

One of the deepest spiritual needs of men liv- 
ing in a sinful world is to be reconciled to the 
results following from their own lives, and cheer- 
fully to acquiesce in the discipline which comes 
to them so often in the guise of the " slings and 
arrows of outrageous fortune." To most of us, 
to accept the hard training of life with serene 
minds presents a greater difficulty than the prob- 
lem of the method by which God forgives us. 
Any explanation of how at-one-ment with God is 
achieved that leaves out of account cosmical evil 
and all that it means to us is woefully provincial. 

Forgiveness cannot any longer be treated as a 
judicial acquitment. In so far as we know any- 
thing about divine pardon, it is an inner witness 
of the spirit, giving peace and joy. Every mod- 
ern doctrine of justification must start, not from 
the conception of a divine judgment seat and a 
legal acquittal, but from the interior needs and 
satisfactions of the human soul. Reconciliation is 
not a written decree, handed down from the throne 
room, declaring us free from all debts or penal- 
ties. It is a prevailing mood of restf ulness, trust, 
and hope in life as it is and is to be. It is glad 
acceptance of our experiences and the ways of 
God. Such reconciliation can only come with the 
conviction that we are living in a divine universe, 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 225 

and that evil has been or will be overcome by 
the good. 

The authors we have consulted hint at another 
aspect of evil which must be dealt with in any 
comprehensive treatment of reconciliation. They 
explain how the injured one is made complacent 
with the injurer. Shakespeare indicates that 
Prospero could be heartily reconciled to those 
who had wronged him because the soul of good- 
ness had been distilled out of things evil. The 
Enchanter had so overruled the malignity of his 
foes that his life had not become the ruin they 
had plotted, but had accomplished its highest 
ends. Had his plans and hopes been devastated, 
and his daughter's career blighted, he could 
scarcely have been reconciled with the perpetra- 
tors of the evil. In the " Paradise Lost " God 
forgives Adam because he knows his own divine 
purposes are not thwarted. Were he impotent in 
the midst of a ruined world, defeated in his cher- 
ished designs, while sin rioted in wild triumph, 
then perfect forgiveness and complete reconcilia- 
tion would have been a very different matter. 

How far have we gone in a doctrine of recon- 
ciliation, if we only show how God receives and 
forgives individual sinners ? Can he gather the 
redeemed about him and look complacently down 
on a wrecked world, thankful that he has saved 
so many out of the overwhelming flood of evil ? 
Can God be reconciled with man and the work of 



226 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

man, if his holy purposes are shattered and the 
sacrifice of his love issues only in irretrievable 
defeat ? It is an axiom in life and in religious 
thought that there is no reconciliation without 
satisfaction. The wrong for which there is no 
spiritual comfort or compensation is a perpetual 
bar to the union of spiritual beings. The con- 
dition upon which God offers blessedness is that 
his holy will be done, his love be satisfied, his 
kingdom be established, and that the wrath of 
man praise him. The Church always assumes this 
victory of God in all its thinking upon the atone- 
ment; and what we involuntarily assume is of 
fundamental importance. It is the ground upon 
which the whole superstructure rests. We can 
build castles in the air if it is not important to 
regard foundations. If God's love is the basis of 
forgiveness, so is his dealing with cosmic evil 
the indispensable factor in reconciliation. To 
treat of divine pardon without mentioning di- 
vine grace is no more inefficient than to discuss 
the atonement and omit all reference to the 
necessity both to God and man of the ultimate 
divine victory over evil. 

I think what has been said makes evident that 
man and God are not reconciled when forgive- 
ness has been given and received. The -conse- 
quences of sin must be dealt with, the memory 
cleansed, the mind made acquiescent with the 
providential order of the world. Eeconciliation 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 227 

cannot be considered apart from the problem of 
cosmic evil. Man cannot be reconciled with his 
past without a faith that God makes the wrath 
of man to praise him. He cannot be reconciled 
to the woes of life unless he is convinced that 
all things work together for good. Neither, 
reasoning from human analogy, can God be 
reconciled to man, if his plans are frustrated by 
the evil of the world. His reconciliation, like 
man's, depends on how evil is dealt with. 

What principle or unquestioned teaching is 
there in the Christian faith which has to do with 
the problem of cosmic evil? If we can find it, 
its contemplation will be a Lethe to heal the 
tortured memory of believers. Its reality is the 
basis upon which God is reconciled to man. The 
answer is not far to seek. A cosmic Christ is 
Christianity's solution of cosmic evil. 

The men who followed Jesus of Nazareth were 
content at first to consider him as an extraor- 
dinary prophet. But as the full significance of 
the grace and beauty that was in him began to 
unfold itself to their minds, they could not think 
of him as being explained by any temporal de- 
signation. The strange light that was in him was 
not human brilliancy; it represented and re- 
vealed an eternal reality. His glory was not of 
the earth, earthy ; it was from heaven ; it was 
the glory of the only begotten of the Father, 
the express image of the Godhead. What he was 



228 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

God had always been. To Paul Christ was a 
spiritual principle ; " in him were all things cre- 
ated in the heavens and upon the earth, things 
visible and things invisible, whether thrones, or 
dominions, or principalities, or powers. All things 
have been created through him and unto him 
and he is before all things and in him all things 
consist." 1 Again, in the earlier letter to the 
Corinthians, speaking of the experiences of the 
Israelites in the wilderness and their spiritual sus- 
tenance, he had said : " For they drank of a 
spiritual rock that followed them ; and the rock 
was Christ." 2 The prologue of the Gospel of John 
sweeps up into the same lofty region of thought : 
" In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All 
things were made by him, and without him was 
not anything made that hath been made. . . . 
He was in the world, and the world was made by 
him, and the world knew him not. . . . And the 
Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we 
beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten 
of the Father, full of grace and truth." 3 In 
the book of the Revelation Christ is referred to 
as "the Lamb that hath been slain from the 
foundation of the world." 4 The Greek fathers, 
yielding to that inevitable tendency of mind 
to recognize in Jesus the image of the Eternal, 

1 Col. i, 16-17. 2 1 Cor. x, 4. 

3 John i, 1 ff. 4 Rev. xiii, 8. 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 229 

declared that the passion of Christ was a sacra- 
ment, a mystery of eternal truth, a visible sign of 
a great supra-temporal act. Christian thinkers 
early elaborated the thought that in God there 
is the perpetually human. There is in him that 
•vhich is akin to humanity ; a nature that created 
us, that is in close touch with our needs, in 
which we subsist, and by which we are redeemed. 

For clearness of thought many Christian think- 
ers have differentiated God as revealed to hu- 
manity from the Infinite Abyss of Being who is 
unsearchable. This God who is beyond the com- 
pass of our thought or experience we call the 
Father. God, as he discloses himself in human- 
ity, we designate as " the Word," "the Son," or, 
when we refer to his highest self-disclosure, we 
say "the Christ." When we think of God not as 
the Source of all things, nor as a Redeemer, but 
as the Spirit operating within us, then we de- 
nominate him the Holy Spirit. Our theologians 
are not always clear, either in their thought or 
their definitions, of these different aspects of 
God's self-declaration, but there is no mistaking 
Christianity's constant assertion that God is in the 
world, reconciling it unto himself. 

As this eternal forth-putting of God, " the 
Word," " the Son," came to its richest and con- 
summate expression in Jesus, the Christ, believers 
express this identity of the historical and the 
Everlasting by the use of the designation, " the 



230 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Eternal Christ." The Eternal Christ is the spirit 
of Jesus in its infinite nature. By this ever-pre- 
sent Christ were all things created. More im- 
portant is the statement that "in him all things 
consist." Every human being depends on him, 
as every wave depends upon the ocean. Like 
the trees nourished in the soil, we are rooted in 
him. He is in all, and over all, and working 
through all. He is the life of every holy aspi- 
ration, the pain in every twinge of remorse, the 
calm of a quiet mind. Being then, so to speak, 
that part of God which is ever present in the 
processes of nature and history, that fringe of 
the Eternal Abyss which comes in contact with 
the shore, that elemental life out of which human- 
ity came and which sustains each individual spirit, 
— being thus inextricably associated with man- 
kind, he must suffer. The sufferings of God in 
the eternal forth-putting of himself which we call 
Christ is a distinctive doctrine of Christianity. 

Our modern faith does not shrink from pro- 
claiming a thorough-going doctrine of the incar- 
nation. The Eternal Son does not look upon the 
woes of men sympathetically, as a traveler might 
sorrow over the destitution of a Turkish village. 
He identifies himself with our life because oue 
with us, enters into the state of retributive disor- 
der, abides here, and suffers until he overcomes 
evil. He did not meet the corporate woe at one 
point, and then escape from the load. His iden- 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 231 

tification with humanity is perpetual. Being 
always in man and for man, he is hurt by every 
sin of man, he feels the sting of every evil, the 
chastisement of every wrong is upon him. 

This thought of God as so identified with man 
that in all our afflictions he is afflicted was a 
staggering one to the ancient mind, trained in 
the philosophy of Greece. Tennyson has finely 
rendered the common feeling about the gods : * 

" who haunt 
The lucid interspace of world and world, 
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, 
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
Their sacred, everlasting calm." 

But once conceive a compassion in God tender 
as that of Jesus, and consider sin to be as black 
as it appeared on Calvary, and such love must be 
thought of as forever suffering for the evils of 
the world. Infinite love is not above the stars, 
but close against sin, tasting its bitterness, endur- 
ing its drenching misery, subduing its malignity. 
And when sin and love meet in such intimate and 
genuine conflict, there must be a burden of woe 
borne by sympathetic and militant love. Such pity 
as Jesus felt for the wretchedness of mankind 
was not a fleeting disposition of an exceptional 
heart ; it is as eternal as the nature of God. The 
forgiving mercy of Jesus was more than an ema- 

1 Lucretius. 



232 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

nation from the nobility of his soul, it was an 
expression of what is everlasting in the Father ; 
the radiant holiness in him was a flash from the 
never-setting Sun of Eighteousness. Conceive 
of the nature of Jesus as eternal in its essence, 
and a belief in the passibility of God is unavoid- 
able. Christ, the self-expression of God in time, 
must have suffered from the foundation of the 
world, and he will suffer so long as men sin. 
Every human affliction is felt by Christ. We 
endure in our person and fortunes the recoil of 
our own transgressions ; but Christ is really taking 
upon himself the sins of the world. He is be- 
ing wounded to-day for our transgressions ; he is 
being bruised by every one of our iniquities. The 
chastisement of our peace is upon him, and by his 
stripes we are healed. • In Jesus of Nazareth the\ 
Eternal Word felt the pangs of the cross. But I 
that three hours' pain was not a spasm ending in 
unbroken joy. It was symbolical of a perpetual 
feeling. What Jesus experienced in spiritual re- 
vulsion from sin, and his suffering on its behalf, 
is a revelation of an unchanging consciousness in I 
God. As the flash of the volcano discloses for a 
few hours the elemental fires at the earth's centre, 
so the light on Calvary was the bursting forth 
through historical conditions of the very nature 
of the Everlasting. There was a cross in the 
heart of God before there was one planted on the 
green hill outside of Jerusalem. And now that 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 233 

the cross of wood has been taken down, the one 
in the heart of God abides, and it will remain 
so long as there is one sinful soul for whom to 
suffer. 

This would be a dreadful doctrine if the pain 
were helpless agony, if it were only impotent 
sorrow whose lengthened woe issued in defeat. 
The Christian doctrine of God would be inferior 
to that of the Greeks, did it not supplement this 
teaching of the infinite passibility of God with 
the assertion that the Almighty abides in perfect 
felicity. In him is completeness of joy because he 
sees the end from the beginning. He knows the 
final result, and in this perfect knowledge there 
is fullness of peace. The sorrow is submerged in 
joy. The sea of glass is mingled with fire. 

The immanent Christ, who lives and suffers in 
every child of man, and who came to highest 
expression in Jesus of Nazareth, is enduring a 
constant passion. Part we know in our own 
experience, and are thus made partakers of his 
sufferings. Part is deeper than any human con- 
sciousness ; it is the unshared sorrow of the Eternal 
Redeemer, but it is not fruitless agony. It is the 
pain of a process which ends in a glorious con- 
summation. The meaning of the twilight dark- 
ness is fulfilled in the joy of the morning.? Jesus 
of Nazareth never placed the significance of the 
crucifixion in its agonies. As he stood before the 
cross in that last fateful week in Jerusalem, in 



234 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

three flashing sentences he disclosed the relation of 
Calvary to the sins of the world : " Now is con- 
demnation come into the world; " that is, the cross 
makes known and condemns sin. "Now is the 
prince of this world cast out;" in the cross sin is 
conquered. " And I, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto myself;" 1 the rev- 
elation of the cross is the persuasive power which 
brings all men to God. The apostolic church 
spoke often of the Master's passion, but it was 
to show why it behooved Christ to suffer. For 
the joy that was set before him he endured the 
cross, despising shame. 2 He was incarnated " that 
through death he might bring to naught him that 
had the power of death, that is, the devil." 3 
The work of Jesus upon earth is the perpetual 
task of the living Christ. He is through all the 
struggling and grief-shadowed ages enduring the 
cross, not in hopeless pain, but for the joy of a 
completed work. Through this constant death 
he is bringing to naught the forces and relicts 
of evil. 

The triumph of Jesus is predicted with perfect 
confidence in the New Testament. It is needless 
to multiply passages. The following will readily 
occur to the reader. In Revelation the Lamb 
that had been slain is seated in the midst of the 
throne, and on his head are many crowns. He 
nailed the old ordinances to the cross, "having 

1 John xii, 31-32. » Heb. xii, 2. 3 Heb. ii, 14. 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 235 

put off from himself the principalities and powers, 
he made a show of them openly, triumphing 
over them in it." l Paul declares that the cruci- 
fied Christ is risen, and that he must reign until 
all things have been subjected unto him, " that 
God may be all in all." 2 This is fulfilled in the 
work of the immanent and transcendent Christ, 
"who created all things, and in whom all things 
consist." "For it was the good pleasure of the 
Father that in him should all fulness dwell ; and 
through him to reconcile all things unto himself, 
having made peace through the blood of his 
cross ; through him, I say, whether things upon 
earth or things in the heavens." 3 It is God's good 
pleasure "to sum up all things in Christ, the 
things in heaven and the things upon earth." 4 
We are not to suppose the great apostle is 
teaching here anything so crude and artificial as 
that the literal blood of Jesus of Nazareth made 
peace between God and man. The blood sym- 
bolizes the sacrificial life. But to Paul the life of 
Christ was not confined to thirty-three years of 
an earthly ministry. It began before time was; 
in him all things consist ; his ever-suffering and 
finally victorious power is toiling through the 
ages, overcoming all evil, wiping out the vestiges 
of sin, subduing all things unto himself until he 
works an actual reconciliation of all things in 

i Col. ii, 14-15. 2 1 Cor. xv, 25 ff. 

» Col. i, 19-20. 4 Eph. i, 10. 



236 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

himself, and all conscious beings recognize their 
life in him. In him they come to their perfec- 
tion and enter into peace. 

All things actually subsist in this immanent, 
eternal Christ. The redeemed are they who by 
faith perceive and acquiesce in this relationship, 
and so find their lives hid with Christ in God, 
rooted and grounded in the soil of his sacrificial 
nature. In him they have their most poignant 
sense of personal unworthiness ; in him they see 
God's righteous forgiveness ; in him, like Dante 
in his beatific vision, they behold life with all its 
mistakes, sins, devastations to be encompassed 
and transfigured by the conquering love of God. 
To them everywhere in this universe the light of 
the glory of God is seen to shine, for God is 
known to be all and in all. 

What the ultimate victory of the immanent 
Christ implies we are not rash enough to assert. 
We may hope it means universal salvation and 
the restoration of all wandering souls; or belief 
in conditional immortality may give to Christ's 
triumph another significance. The contents of 
this idea are beyond our ken. All that is here 
affirmed is that both the Scriptures and the 
Christian faith teach that the living Christ will 
completely subdue all evil, and that sin will be 
so dealt with and its consequences so expunged 
that every living creature will be satisfied. God's 
holy love will indeed appear to be in all things. 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 237 

This victory over sin and its consequences — 
this satisfactory dealing with cosmical evil by the 
suffering strength of the eternal Christ — is an 
essential part of the atonement. Without it there 
may be forgiveness, but there is no reconcilia- 
tion. God's holy love is the cause, Christ's supra- 
temporal sufferings are essential to the process, 
but the ultimate victory is not a negligible factor. 
May we not justly describe it as the ground of 
reconciliation ? 

God must be satisfied ! This assertion has 
rung through every great theory of the atone- 
ment. How he is satisfied has been explained 
according to the prevailing ideas of the age. In 
the time of chivalry his personal honor was shown 
to be appeased, by either the plenary or adequate 
suffering of Christ; in the days of juster gov- 
ernment the majesty of the law was declared to 
be vindicated ; interpreted in its priestly aspect, 
Christ's work was a full repentance and confes- 
sion of humanity's sinfulness. To the modern 
Christian, trained to think of God as a Father, 
satisfaction comes through the expression and 
activity of his compassion. The interpretation 
here made carries this thought to its full mean- 
ing. What satisfies God is the glorious accom- 
plishment of his work in creation and redemp- 
tion. His plans are fulfilled, his love achieves 
its perfect work; in no part of the universe 
is his glory dimmed. Nothing less than this 



238 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

would satisfy God. Forgiveness might be pos- 
sible, but not reconciliation, if he must sit 
desolate on his throne amid his ruined worlds 
while evil holds high carnival. If sin fatally 
obstructs his benevolent designs, thwarts his 
purposes, hopelessly blots his fair creation, surely 
God is not satisfied ; neither can he be recon- 
ciled to the authors of this perpetual outrage. 
If we have a right to interpret in any way divine 
things by human, — and this is our only method 
of understanding the spiritual world, — then God 
can be neither satisfied nor reconciled unless his 
benevolent purposes in creation are consum- 
mated. 

Neither can a man be fully redeemed unless 
the Eternal Christ is victor. His will may be 
atoned and his heart have perfect love, but peace 
is impossible if the memory holds the past un- 
relieved. The mind must be purged of an evil 
conscience; the "stuff'd bosom" cleansed of the 
"stuff that weighs upon the heart." There must 
be a Lethe in whose clear waves the black color 
of the past will fade. There is but one River 
of Forgetfulness that is sufficient. When, like 
Dante, we bathe our eyes in the River of Light 
and see the triumph of the kingdom, we shall be 
at peace. If we knew that our sins were to go 
on forever unchecked, that others were perpetu- 
ally to suffer through our faithlessness, that the 
footprints of our sin were never to be effaced, and 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 239 

that the consequences were to roll on in ever 
destructive power, then there would remain no 
rest for the people of God. The prodigal could 
not feast in the Father's house for the memory 
of those he had led into sin. 

What will satisfy man, and purge his memory 
without destroying it? There is but one answer. 
In this world by faith he will lay hold of the 
triumph of Christ. He will believe that all things 
work together for good, and that God makes the 
wrath of man to praise him. He will rest trust- 
fully on the promise that God in Christ has 
taken up even his sin and all its consequences 
into an unchangeable redemptive purpose, and 
that the will of God will be done. In this faith 
he has peace. What he cannot do for himself the 
ever-living and ever-victorious Christ will do for 
him. He reposes on the divine grace, not merely 
because it is grace, but because it is divine and 
therefore triumphant. He beholds Christ actually 
bearing his transgressions, taking literally the 
terrible consequences upon himself, and so carry- 
ing them as to annul them. This is the believer's 
peace ; it is the reconciliation with his past into 
which he enters by faith. 

It is also his reconciliation with all the dis- 
asters and evil of his life. This faith in the 
triumph of God has always been the hope and 
joy of the Christian. Without it there is no 
reconciliation, no peace. In the world to come, 



240 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

faith is changed to vision. In the splendor of 
the perfect light our sins and their entailment 
of evil would seem woeful beyond description, 
were it not that we shall behold them in the 
sea of Christ's overwhelming and victorious love. 
Where sin has abounded grace will be seen 
to have much more abounded, and the glory of 
grace will cause even the blackness of sin to 
shine. 

Assuredly, the victory of Christ over evil is as 
essential a part of the atonement as his sufferings. 
The triumph of the cross is no more to be left out 
of sight in a discussion of the atonement than 
are its sorrows. The end is as important as the 
means. The result of the battle has as much to 
do with the success of the cause as the methods 
by which it is fought. The Christ indwelling in 
humanity accepts the consequences of our sin 
into his own heart and life, and makes them his. 
He assumes them, bears them for us, feels their 
weight. But coming against his strength, their 
power is stayed, they are buried in the sea of his 
might, they are trampled under his feet, they 
are perfectly subdued. This is not rhetoric, 
but observed fact. There is a vis medicatrix 
in society. A power not ourselves is working 
for righteousness. The sins of the fathers are 
visited upon the children unto the third and 
fourth generation, but the good is transmitted 
for thousands of generations, for it is supple- 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 241 

mented and preserved by the nature of things, 
which is good. Everywhere we find ourselves in 
the presence of an immense healing power. When 
the body is wounded, the remedial forces of na- 
ture begin their cleansing and restorative pro- 
cesses. When the soul receives a fearful hurt, 
the treasuries of peace and strength are hard by. 
What seemed at the moment to be irretrievable 
disaster is found to contain the elements of great 
good. For a true soul every fall may become 
a fall upward, every loss may be made to pro- 
duce a high result in gain. Working through 
all things there is a Reason, an ever unfolding 
Righteousness, a purifying and sustaining Good- 
ness. 

This indwelling God, whom because most 
fully manifested to us by Jesus of Nazareth, we 
call the living Christ, is making an actual atone- 
ment. He is not doing something legal and 
forensic which the Father accepts as the best 
that can be done, and on the ground of which 
he is reconciled. The immanent, suffering, and 
victorious Christ is doing a genuine work ; he is 
healing the disease of sin, he is emending its 
destructive effects. He is cleansing what has 
been stained, and making whole what has been 
severed. And his work will continue until this 
fair universe is what the Creator intended it to 
be. The fullness of God shall be in all things, 
the glory of God shall everywhere shine un- 



242 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

dimmed, and the will of God shall everywhere be 
done. Faith in this is the peace and reconcili- 
ation of the saints. Its accomplishment is the 
satisfaction of God. It is his reconciliation with 
whatever the hurt of evil has meant to him. If 
human sin and its consequences mean anything 
to the Creator, — and Christian faith instructed 
at Calvary believes that it means much, — then 
the divine satisfaction can consist in nothing less 
than having the suffering for sin culminate in 
the glorious fulfillment of the purposes of love 
and righteousness. .) 

The old conception that Jesus in the act and 
article of his death paid for us a debt which we 
could not pay for ourselves made a strong appeal 
for Christian activity. Stronger, however, is the 
motive which the conception of the progressive, 
age-long work of a suffering Redeemer calls into 
life. Faith in Christ, present in the world, bear- 
ing our sins, and wounded in all our transgres- 
sions, cannot but persuade us, as it did Paul, that 
it is a privilege to fill up that which is lacking in 
the afflictions of Christ. 1 We may endure with 
him the weight of the world's woe ; we may be 
laborers together with him ; we may share with 
him the work of redeeming the world. Our con- 
nection with him is real, not sentimental. We are 
genuine actors on the stage, and upon us rests 
a heavy responsibility. By our willfulness we 

* Col. i, 24. 






THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 243 

quench his spirit, obstruct his work, lead him anew 
to Gethsemane. By our faithfulness we glorify 
him. We augment his efficiency in the world, and 
hasten the day of his victory. The battle we are 
righting is a real one. We are not mimic soldiers, 
marching and countermarching on a stage. Great 
issues are being decided by our conduct. If the 
world battle is won, it will be won in and through 
humanity. It will be by the divine energy 
expressing itself through obedient human wills. 
Man is an indispensable agent in the vast work 
of healing the open wound of the world. This 
complete identification of ourselves with Christ 
in redemption makes a deeper call on our love and 
energy than does gratitude for a finished work. 
To us, as to Simon, is given the privilege of help- 
ing the Christ bear his cross up Calvary. We 
carry an actual load, we do right yeoman service, 
we are partakers of his sufferings, and, therefore, 
we are with him to behold his glory and have 
part in the joy of his triumph. To help forward 
his victory of righteousness has been the aim of 
the good in all ages. "Socii Dei sumus," said 
Seneca. Christianity has taken this common 
instinct, and shown how rich and genuine it is. 

In the constant recurrence of the thought that 
there is a soul of goodness in things evil, the 
writer would not be understood as taking the 
position, so forcibly expressed by Emerson, that 
evil is "good in the making;" nor would he 



244 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

range himself with the Neoplatonists in the op- 
timistic opinion that evil is the necessary foil 
of good, a mere negative thing, " the shadow of 
the light." Much so-called evil may doubtless 
thus be explained ; but is it not the more compre- 
hensive and rational view that sin, with its blast- 
ing trail of moral evil, is not essential to the 
universe ? Is not sin an irrational and alien thing 
which is to be got rid of at great cost ? There 
never was an evil action performed but a good 
one in its place would have led to better results. 
Sin is wrong, but God's action in reference to it 
is right, and from right action springs good. 
The soul of goodness which is in things evil is 
the presence of the indwelling God, and it is 
from that fountain of light that the good flows 
forth, and not from the darkness of the sin. The 
uplifting power is in the grace that abounds, and 
is not a constituent part of moral wreckage. 

The task to which we set ourselves has now 
been accomplished. The approach to God's work 
of reconciliation through Christ by the way of 
Eterature and the conscious needs of the human 
soul rather than along the beaten paths of Scrip- 
tural interpretation has been an untried one. 
Like all new trails blazed through a tangled for- 
est, the path we have cut has doubtless been rough 
and often obscure. But the work has been worth 
doing, and if any student of the atonement 
travels this way again he will have abundant 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 245 

opportunity to make the crooked straight and 
the obscure plain. The writer's greatest fear is 
that in his persistent endeavor to be clear he has 
made his subject matter appear cut and dried. To 
separate any living thing into its component parts 
is a deadening process. The soul weaves its mys- 
tical fibres into the life of God in so many ways 
that any attempt to state in the form of prin- 
ciples and systems what is a vital experience ap- 
pears mechanical and unreal. This limitation, 
however, rests upon every one who would inter- 
pret life in terms of thought. That there may 
be no misunderstanding of what has been at- 
tempted, let us briefly recapitulate the conclusions 
reached. 

We began with the assumption that as Sin, 
Retribution, and Reconciliation are the themes 
considered both in the Scriptures and in the su- 
preme works of literature, the poets as well as the 
apostles might help us to understand what God 
in Christ did for our reconciliation. We have 
found that literature sustained the contention of 
theology that forgiveness, taking place in a moral 
universe, must be so in accord with righteousness 
that the sanctity of the moral law shall receive 
no diminution. With the forgiveness of the in- 
dividual, and the destruction of the love of sin 
and its power in him, most theologians stop. 
Literature and the spiritual needs of one con- 
victed of sin go further. The terrible feature of 



246 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

transgression is its entailment of woe upon 
others. The consequences of sin must be taken 
up in any complete solution of the problem of 
reconciliation. Else man cannot be reconciled to 
his past; else there is no atonement for his 
memory ; no " enthusiastic temper of espousal " 
toward life and its disciplinary troubles. Even 
God cannot be reconciled, if sin eternally thwarts 
his holy purposes. In a thorough gospel of recon- 
ciliation there must not only be forgiveness, but 
the absolute repose of the mind, both of God and 
of man, in the divine disposal of sin and its con- 
sequences. 

In the historical Jesus the free pardon of sin is 
mediated. This belief is the permanent posses- 
sion of the church. But Jesus did more. He es- 
tablished the abiding conviction that there are 
no dates in God's disposition towards men ; that 
there is no time element in his feelings. He dis- 
closed the Father's eternal attitude toward us. 
He so interpreted and brought near to our sense 
of need the indwelling God that Christian think- 
ers have found religious satisfaction in speaking 
of the immanent God as the Eternal Christ. This 
designation fits our spiritual necessities. It brings 
close the humanity of God. It makes him per- 
sonal, human, understandable. In the living, ever 
present Christ all things subsist. By repentance 
and faith we become spiritually one with him. 
Because we are thus identified with him and share 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 247 

his life we are " accepted in the beloved." We 
grow up into his likeness, and the atonement be- 
comes an achievement, an at-one-ment with God 
in Christ. 

A further truth urged in this book is that by 
the Eternal Christ's reconciling work there is an 
achievement in the world as well as in the indi- 
vidual. As a man's life is inextricably woven 
into the history of the world, he is not saved 
apart from others. By faith the individual must 
enter into Christ's work for the race ere his own 
soul can be healed. A comprehensive theory of 
the atonement must consider both the destruc- 
tion of sin in the heart of the transgressor and 
the amendment of its consequences in the world. 
Reconciliation is thus more than forgiveness. It 
presupposes a harmony which mere pardon can- 
not accomplish. A repose of man in God like the 
peace of Jesus in the Father is impossible if on 
either side there is a tormenting memory of an 
irremediable wrong. There must be a reconcilia- 
tion embracing the entire sphere of man's rela- 
tionship with God. Such a thorough and aeonian 
work must originate with God and be carried on 
by him. God in Christ is accomplishing in his- 
tory this reconciliation. His spirit is in human- 
ity. Each wrong thought or deed is a sin against 
him. He is wounded for our transgressions and 
bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of 
our peace is upon him and by his stripes we are 



248 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

healed. He is bearing our sins and their conse- 
quences, not spectacularly, not legally, not fo- 
rensically, but actually. Yet he is bearing them 
to some purpose. Immortal love is outwearing 
mortal sin. This wounded conqueror from Edom 
is traveling in the greatness of his strength. 

Religious thought in the past, in its considera- 
tion of reconciliation between God and man, has 
turned its attention almost exclusively on the 
significance of the sufferings of Jesus of Naza- 
reth. The older theology affirmed that the agony 
upon the cross was equivalent to the misery en- 
tailed by sin, and therefore satisfied divine justice. 
Later it was held that God accepted the sacrifice 
as equivalent to the penalties merited by evil. 
Then it was maintained that Calvary revealed 
the nature of evil and the holy love of God. The 
church has lingered around the cross, absorbed in 
the contemplation of the sorrows of the Lamb of 
God, and intent upon explaining their meaning. 
The contention here made is that, in addition to 
the revelation of God's grace and man's need, the 
cross has another significance. To Jesus and to 
the apostolic church it was the throne of victory ; 
a revelation of spiritual triumph over sin and 
death. The primitive Christians for four or five 
centuries never represented the suffering Christ 
in their catacombs or on their sarcophagi. He 
was to them the ever-living, glorified, victorious 
Christ. 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST AND RECONCILIATION 249 

We must restore the ancient faith, and magnify 
the enthroned and sceptred Redeemer. If the 
cross declares the passion of the eternal love of 
God, it equally asserts a passion issuing in vic- 
tory. It leads our thoughts to an eternal, indwell- 
ing Christ who is not only bearing our sins, but 
bearing them away. He is not merely taking the 
consequences upon himself, he is overcoming the 
evil of them, making men's mistakes, errors, sins, 
either to be restrained, or to work out God's re- 
demptive purpose. He is saving the individual, 
he is also saving the world. He is not suffering 
expiatory pains which God accepts as an atone- 
ment ; he is working a real expiation, he is aton- 
ing for evil by a counterbalancing good. Upon 
this conquest of good over evil, reasoning from 
human analogy, does perfect reconciliation de- 
pend. Forgiveness is the outgrowth of penitence 
accepting holy love, but reconciliation, in the 
full significance of the word, is conditioned upon 
the triumph of holy love over the aggregate 
issue of sin. God is satisfied with nothing less 
than the complete expression of his love and 
righteousness carried through to its final purpose. 
Surely the fulfillment enters into his reconcilia- 
tion as well as the suffering on the way thither. 

This triumph of God's purpose and the ac- 
complishment of his will is the peace of the 
redeemed. By faith even now we enter into the 
joy of that victory. We take by faith, while liv- 



250 ATONEMENT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ing, our " freehold of thanksgiving." The bur- 
den of sin rolls from off our mortal shoulders 
upon omnipotent strength. One is bearing them 
who will dispose of them in righteousness. To 
his resistless grace we trust our past and all its 
mistakes. Reposing in this supreme Goodness we 
joyfully accept the stern discipline of the present. 
In this sure victory of divine love and holiness 
we rest in perfect trust. ('Hereafter, when faith 
has changed to unobstructed vision and we see 
God face to face, we shall be satisfied with all 
his ways; with the vision will come a perfect 
reconciliation. 

Some day the church that has lingered weep- 
ing at the cross will catch a glimpse of a splendor 
which will dim the shadow, and with exultant joy 
will preach the glad tidings that the blood of 
Christ, offered through the eternal Spirit, is effi- 
cacious through all the ages, changing the wrath 
of man to praise, restraining the residue of evil, 
and achieving for God and man the great Recon- 
ciliation. 



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